Huntington PD's $800K DOJ Grants Missed Both Sets of Targets
Summary
A July 2026 Justice Department Inspector General audit examined two federal grants totaling $800,367 that the Bureau of Justice Assistance awarded the Huntington, West Virginia Police Department in 2023 -- one to distribute tracking devices to people who wander due to dementia or developmental disabilities, the other to reduce recidivism among jailed misdemeanants through reentry services. Neither program was on pace. More than two years into the device program, only 5 of the 100 devices the department had bought were in anyone's hands; that number only climbed, to 90, after the audit itself pushed the department to act. The reentry program had enrolled 213 of its 480-inmate target with five months left on the grant. The audit found no problem with how the money was spent -- the costs were allowable and properly tracked -- the problem was that spending it didn't translate into the outcomes it was funded to produce.
5 devices out, more than two years in
Huntington PD's approved grant proposal⧉ called for buying 500 electronic monitoring devices in the project's first six months and distributing them free to guardians and caregivers of at-risk wanderers. By February 2026, the department had purchased only 100 -- and never filed the paperwork (a Grant Award Modification) required to formally revise the target down. It also switched vendors: rather than the $300 device it had budgeted for, it bought a $1,238.76 unit with GPS tracking and two-way voice, about 4.1 times the original per-device price, which is most of the reason 100 devices consumed most of the $150,000 the plan had allotted for 500.
The distribution numbers were worse than the purchase numbers. As of the auditors' February 2026 fieldwork, only 5 of the 100 devices had reached anyone -- 3 of them to clients of a single hospice provider the department had relied on almost exclusively for referrals. It took the auditors raising the issue, and a March 2026 press release the department credits with generating new interest, to move that number: to 30 by the time 's draft report went out, and -- per Huntington PD's own June 9, 2026 written response -- to 90 of 100 devices deployed or in progress by the time the final report was published.
View data as table
| Feb. 2026 | 5 | of 100 devices purchased |
|---|---|---|
| Apr. 2026 | 30 | of 100 devices purchased |
| Jun. 2026 | 90 | of 100 devices purchased |
A jail reentry program less than half staffed toward its goal
The second grant funded Huntington PD's existing Turn Around Program, which pairs inmates at the Western Regional Jail who have co-occurring mental-health or substance-use disorders with a behavioral-health subrecipient for screening, treatment referrals, and post-release support -- aimed at a 10 percent cut in recidivism. The audit⧉ found that from the grant's October 2023 start through April 1, 2026, the program had enrolled 213 of its 480-inmate target, or about 44 percent, with the grant period ending in September 2026 -- five months out. Huntington PD officials told auditors the shortfall traces to its behavioral-health subrecipient running short-staffed, including stretches with only one clinician available while a second was still being trained.
View data as table
| Enrolled | 213 | as of April 1, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Target | 480 | grant ends September 2026 |
Clean spending, unchecked subrecipients
Auditors were explicit that this wasn't a fraud finding: they tested 100 percent of the equipment costs and a sample of subaward invoices and found the money itself was spent allowably. What they did find was a monitoring gap. Huntington PD had never evaluated its Turn Around subrecipients' financial-management systems or run a formal monitoring event, and had no subrecipient-monitoring policy of its own -- it leaned on the city of Huntington's generic version instead. That gap let two billing problems slide: one subrecipient had been significantly underbilling its own personnel costs for months because a former employee used the wrong budget formula, and a second subrecipient's invoices listed only a lump monthly total with no breakdown of services rendered.
Huntington PD moved fast once flagged it: within a day of submitting its written response, the department adopted a new subrecipient-monitoring policy (General Order 3.360, effective June 8, 2026) and filed grant modifications on both awards. But even that fix wasn't fully clean -- 's own closing review caught that the new policy states the wrong federal audit threshold, $750,000, when the correct figure under 2 C.F.R. § 200.501⧉ has been $1,000,000 since October 2024. OJP marked the recommendation resolved anyway, on the strength of everything else the new policy got right.
The takeaway
- Neither $800,367 grant was mishandled financially, and neither hit its performance target. found no questioned costs and accurate fund tracking on both awards -- the failure was entirely programmatic, not a money trail gone missing.
- The device program's turnaround tracks almost exactly with the audit's timeline. Distribution sat at 5 of 100 devices for over two years, then moved to 30 once raised the issue and Huntington PD publicized the program, then to 90 by the time the department wrote its formal response -- accountability, in this case, visibly doing the job outreach hadn't.
- The reentry program has no comparable rescue window. At 213 of 480 enrolled with five months left on the grant, hitting the target -- or the 10 percent recidivism cut it's meant to produce -- depends on fixing subrecipient staffing fast; 's recommendation was only to "reevaluate expectations," not a plan that gets Huntington PD there.
All figures are from Report 26-071, "Audit of the Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Assistance Grants Awarded to the Huntington Police Department, Huntington, West Virginia," released July 14, 2026, read in full via a direct PDF fetch and pdftotext extraction. archive.org's Save Page Now service returned an HTTP 520 outage error on the single capture attempt made for this piece, so the inline citations and capture both point directly at the oversight.gov asset rather than a Wayback snapshot.
The 4.1x per-device cost multiple, the 20% device-purchase-scale figure, the 44.4% Turn Around completion rate, and the 36.7% cumulative drawdown share are this outlet's own arithmetic on -reported numbers (methods and caveats in analysis.json); states the underlying figures but not these derived percentages. A blind adversarial verifier, working from the primary document alone with no access to this draft, independently confirmed the itemized facts and computed checks before publication; see verification.json.
Sources(1) ▾
- U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Audit Division, Audit of the Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Assistance Grants Awarded to the Huntington Police Department, Huntington, West Virginia (Report 26-071) (2026-07-14) — 's performance and financial-management audit of two Bureau of Justice Assistance grants awarded to the Huntington, WV Police Department: the Kevin and Avonte Program (device-distribution project for people with dementia/developmental disabilities who wander) and the Improving Adult and Youth Crisis Stabilization and Community Reentry Program (jail-based recidivism-reduction program). Source for every figure in this piece, including the grant totals, the device-purchase and distribution numbers, the inmate-enrollment figures, the subrecipient-monitoring findings, and both the Huntington PD's and OJP's written responses reproduced in Appendices 2-4. oversight.gov · original document
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In September 2023, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) awarded the Huntington, West Virginia Police Department (Huntington PD) two unrelated grants totaling $800,367 -- one to buy and distribute electronic tracking devices to guardians of people who wander due to dementia or developmental disabilities, the other to fund reentry services for misdemeanants at the Western Regional Jail. A July 2026 DOJ Office of Inspector General audit⧉ found the department kept clean books on both grants -- no questioned costs, accurate drawdowns -- but fell well short of what each program was funded to accomplish. On the device program specifically, the audit's own scrutiny appears to be what finally moved the number.