The Baltimore County Police Department has announced a partnership with the Randallstown branch of the NAACP to bolster recruitment and diversify staff.

The partnership, which is expected to help fill some of the agency’s 221 police officer vacancies, will kick off at noon on Saturday with a public recruitment event at the Randallstown Community Center. The event will include one-on-one talks with authorities, panels and physical fitness tests for aspiring police officers. More events and programs are expected, including mentorship, school outreach and informational sessions.

As the county becomes more diverse, the department is seeing to have a force that reflects that diversity.

From 2021 to 2023, the proportion of newly hired minority police officers has increased from 46% to 55%, police data shows.

Ryan Coleman, president of the Randallstown NAACP, said it is particularly important to attract and maintain a diverse staff with cultural competence.

“If you have more diversity, I think it enables the Police Department to better understand the community in which they serve,” Coleman said.

Coleman said the unique partnership supports the Police Department’s community-based approach to policing.

“It’s not about parachuting in and parachuting out. … It’s about getting to know the people you’re policing before a crime happens,” he said. This, in turn, helps foster trust between police and the communities they serve, diffuse tension and improve policing efforts, Coleman said.

The partnership comes more than four years after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, in an incident that was captured on video and spurred national outrage. Floyd’s May 2020 murder and other killings of Black people by police escalated tensions between the police and Black communities, which decried racially targeted use of force. In 2023, a Washington Post-ABC poll found that 39% of U.S. adults were confident that police were properly trained to avoid the use of excessive force, marking the lowest confidence level since the first survey in 2014.

Police departments struggled to attract new recruits amid the reckoning.

But recent police data suggests the pendulum is starting to swing the other way, said Baltimore County Police Capt. Steven Longo.

Police Chief Robert O. McCullough reiterated this point in a County Council hearing in October.

Police departments nationally and locally are looking to capitalize on this moment. They have started to offer more generous compensation packages to bolster their departments.

“We’re trying to do advertising through our recruitment incentives, our bonuses,” Longo said. “We’re trying to separate ourselves and highlight the good work that the members of the agency do on a daily basis and try to show [the Police Department] is an attractive spot to be.”