With a group of Ballou High School students watching, the District’s mayor and police chief on Thursday relaunched a high school cadet program, with hopes of attracting a new generation of homegrown law enforcement officers.

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       “We want police officers who represent and reflect D.C. residents, who understand our city and our culture, and who are invested in our communities,” Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said at a ceremony in the school’s library. She vowed to “throw every resource at violent crime” and “part of that commitment means hiring more D.C. residents to become D.C. police.”

       The high school cadet program will allow seniors to gain insight into what it means to be part of the D.C. police force while continuing to complete their high school education. They will get mentoring and training in a part-time program 12 hours each week.

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       After school, they can join the cadet corps program full time, earning about $35,000 a year working a variety of police jobs and earning 60 tuition-free college credits at the University of the District of Columbia. Officials say many cadets go on to join the police force.

       Also on Thursday, Bowser proposed legislation to remove a requirement that applicants to the cadet corps program have graduated from a D.C. high school, “opening up the program to more young adults who live in the District.”

       The cadet corps program has long been a way for the police department to expand its ranks by reaching into the communities it serves. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III joined the cadet corps in 1989, when he was 17, and credits it with helping him escape the drug-torn neighborhood of Carver Terrace, where he grew up.

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       “It changed my entire life,” Contee said at his confirmation hearing earlier this year. “It was these and other opportunities that helped shape the man I am today.”

       The cadet program has had its ups and downs, dwindling to just 20 cadets before the Bowser administration revived it in 2016. There are now 150 cadets in the program, half women and nearly all people of color.

       “They have the highest retention rate of anyone in our department,” Contee said at Ballou. “When they come and join the Metropolitan Police Department, like yours truly, they stay and serve our city.”

       D.C. leaders view the cadet program as a recruitment tool to attract native Washingtonians to a force made up of many officers who grew up elsewhere. In one recent recruit class, all but five of the 31 members were from cities and towns outside D.C.

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       Ballou senior Aaliyah Surrat, 18, of Southeast plans to join the cadet corps once she graduates at the end of the fall semester.

       “What has me interested is helping the community,” she said. “The community needs more people out here willing to help. I feel as though this would be a good experience for me to become somebody. And, it’s good that we see familiar faces of people that went here that joined the program.”

       One of those faces was Davia Cain, a 2019 Ballou graduate who is a current police cadet and is joining a recruit class in January to train to be an officer.

       “This is the best job that I’ve ever had,” Cain, 21, said. “I don’t see myself doing nothing else. I’m almost there. Being a cadet gave me a footstep in the door.”

       Peter Hermann contributed to this report.