Agencies Have Until October 5 to Apply for BJA Crisis Response Training Grants

Agencies that still send people out of town for crisis-response training, or that do not have a way for several officers to run a scenario together, have a short federal window this fall. The Bureau of Justice Assistance opened the FY 2026 Crisis Response Training Program on August 25. About $5.26 million is on the table for police and corrections shops to build or expand that work.

BJA’s FY 2026 program can fund crisis-response training, multi-officer VR, or both.

The first filing is in Grants.gov on October 5, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. The full application is due in JustGrants on October 13 at 8:59 p.m. Eastern. Miss the Grants.gov date and the second deadline does not matter.

BJA expects eight awards, four for law enforcement and four for jails and prisons, at up to $650,000 each. The work runs 36 months starting January 1, 2027. There is no local match.

What the money actually pays for

The grant is for developing, implementing, or expanding training that helps officers handle people in crisis, including behavioral health conditions, intellectual and developmental disabilities, physical disabilities, and traumatic brain injuries. BJA’s phrase is “crisis response and intervention training.” The solicitation does not say CIT or Crisis Intervention Team, so that label should not be written into an application as if BJA required it.

Law enforcement awards cover sworn personnel: police departments, sheriff’s offices, field probation and parole, and campus police. Those shops can buy crisis-response training, a virtual-reality system that lets more than one officer train at once, or both.

Corrections awards cover facility-based officers, including detention staff, institutional probation and parole, and officers in other lockups. The same split applies, with VR built for institutional settings. One application can go after only one of those two categories.

Who can file, and who cannot

Eligible applicants are state, county, city, township, and tribal governments; public and private colleges; other units of local government; and public or state-controlled colleges or hospitals that have their own campus police. Nonprofits, for-profit companies, and training vendors are not listed as applicants. If two organizations will run the project, only one files. The other comes in as a subrecipient.

Anyone proposing VR has to name the platform, the curriculum behind it, the outcome data they will collect, and how several people will train in the same scenario at once.

What training staff should do this month

If your agency wants a seat, start or renew SAM.gov now. BJA tells applicants to begin that by September 5 and no later than September 21. Training coordinators should decide this week whether they are chasing classroom crisis-response hours, multi-officer VR, or both, and which category they fit. Grant writers should treat October 5 as the hard first gate, not October 13.

Vendors that want in should find an eligible agency to carry the application. The solicitation does not name a preferred trainer.

Sources

• Bureau of Justice Assistance, BJA FY 2026 Crisis Response Training Program (O-BJA-2026-172706)
• BJA, opportunity page