Entrepreneur Jamye Wooten’s mission is to help Black-led business owners in Baltimore forge their own destinies. 

Wooten, 52, is a Baltimore native. He grew up in the Irvington community in Southwest Baltimore and then moved to the West Hills community. Wooten’s father Palmer owned five dry-cleaning businesses as well as several night clubs, his mother Janice was a florist, and his sister Sherri owns a pizza shop in East Baltimore. Coming from a family of business owners influenced his own desire to give back to the community. 

“My dad sponsored softball teams, basketball teams…through his business,” Wooten said.  “And so that was deeply rooted in me. And I just love Baltimore. I think it’s a town with so many folks that are giving back to the community, but yet we haven’t necessarily invested in them.”

To that point, from May 29-31, Wooten’s organization CLLCTIVLY will host We Give Black, a three-day gathering featuring storytelling sessions, workshops, and performances across the city.

“We Give Black recognizes culture as capital—our stories, healing traditions and ancestral wisdom are true abundance. We’re revitalizing a legacy of communal power,” Wooten said.

Wooten’s journey to supporting Black entrepreneurship in Baltimore took a winding path. 

Wooten graduated from Woodlawn High School before going to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. He attended London Academy in the United Kingdom for his MBA, studied at UMBC, and has been a fellow at Princeton University, Boston University, and Duke University. 

Initially, he intended to study hotel, restaurant, and tourism management at UMBC but after he took a class in political science, everything changed. He created a degree program in interdisciplinary studies that combines Africana studies and financial economics into a degree program called Pan African development.

Wooten had been conducting national work focused on digital strategy and movement building from Ferguson to the Congo. After the killing of Freddie Gray in 2015, he came back from the Congo to the United States and co-founded Baltimore United for Change with grassroots organizations Leaders of a Beautiful Black Struggle, The Black Church Food Security Network, The Algebra Project, and others. In 2019, Wooten and those organizations launched CLLCTIVLY,  a coalition of grassroots activists and concerned citizens that awards grants to Black-led businesses in Baltimore. 

“Part of it was looking at the ways in which, again, Black-led organizations have historically been disinvested, underfunded. And we wanted to be somewhat disruptive,” Wooten said. “It wasn’t a big grant. It’s a $1,000 grant. Happens every month. Organizations submit a two- to three-minute video, and the community at large would vote. And now we’ve had over 110,000 people vote.”

Since its launch, the group has gone from awarding $1,000 micro grants to $75,000 grants, to now awarding close to $4 million in no-strings-attached grants to support Black-led organizations in Baltimore. 

Wooten said his organization focuses on three parts: give, amplify, and imagine. “Give” refers to resource mobilization, from crowdfunding and grant-making to support organizations whether they are for profit non profit or community based organizations with no legal structure, but have impact within the community. “Amplify” is about uplifting and boosting stories of Black organizations. “Imagine” is primarily about learning and convening, Wooten said.

Wooten said this spirit of entrepreneurship came from him witnessing the work his parents did, and learning from the history of philanthropy within Baltimore. It was by doing this Wooten said he realized traditional philanthropy wasn’t going to fund or sustain their work. 

“Here in Baltimore, I think there’s a long history of something called social entrepreneurship, where folks have been mission-driven, but also knew they needed revenue-based models to support and sustain their work,” Wooten said.  “I think often in the nonprofit world, you are starting with a problem, you’re defining your community as a problem, and then you’re trying to sort of respond to that. I think from an entrepreneurial standpoint, we can be much more if we can stay in the space of innovation.”

Wooten said that while he sees a lot of entrepreneurship in the city, there is not a lot of investment. He said he hopes to even the playing field so that Black-led businesses will have the same opportunities that others do. This means that they should have the opportunity to afford failure—should it happen. 

“So even having the risk capital, the ability to fail and not feel like a failure, the ability to risk, right?” Wooten said. “Because for everyone else, they’re learning, they’re innovating, and they’re learning, and they’re iterating. They’re not failing. They’re using even that million dollar loss.”

Something that separates Wooten’s organization from other investment groups is that their money comes with no strings attached. He defined it as putting people before projects and programs. Wooten said that people should be able to do things like pay their rent or treat themselves to a spa day. He said he wants the people who receive this money to not just survive but thrive.

Wooten said that the organization is a disruptor by going against what donations and philanthropy typically look like. This comes from how much of the money is driven by what the community wants.

“And so the disruption is handing over that decision-making power to the community,” Wooten said. “For the community to decide for themselves what are the priorities, and how we disseminate resources.”

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The Baltimore Police Accountability Board (PAB) is looking to use other accountability groups as models for their own organization. They discussed their thoughts at their November 4 meeting, held on Zoom.

Comprising 17 members who were appointed by Mayor Brandon Scott, along with Baltimore City Council, the group is responsible for handling police misconduct complaints, holding regular meetings with the heads of law enforcement, and issuing public reports about the state of police misconduct in Baltimore.

This year, PAB’s board sent several of its members to The National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) conference. NACOLE is a nonprofit organization working to foster the growth of civilian oversight of law enforcement agencies, jails, and prisons. The board attended the conference to identify solutions to improve civilian oversight in Baltimore. 

Samuela Ansah, the board’s liaison, said she attended a panel on transparency surrounding the Chicago Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA). 

“They’re definitely a model to aspire to,” said Ansah on the possibility of PAB adopting COPA’s strategies, adding that the panel was “informative.” She left feeling reassured that police accountability issues aren’t exclusive to cities like Baltimore.

Like Baltimore’s board, members of COPA can only investigate cases of potential police misconduct and make recommendations.

“It happens everywhere. It’s just the reality of doing oversight, and there are definitely strategies for overcoming it.”

Jesmond Riggins, a board member, divided his takeaways from the conference into three segments, the first being that Baltimore needs its own independent office of civilian oversight. (Like Ansah, Riggins cited COPA in Chicago as a suitable example.)

Riggins’ second takeaway was that community education should be PAB’s primary outreach tool, while the third—which Riggins said was inspired by the New York Civilian  Complaint Review Board—involved identifying more efficient methods for collecting complaint data. 

Riggins said that an important topic raised during the conference was a lack of public knowledge of police oversight strategies.

“People tend to forget why they need civilian oversight until another tragedy happens,” said Riggins.

“If memory—or keeping the public engaged—is an issue, then how do we institutionalize memory? How do we perpetuate memory in the community?” 

During the meeting, PAB also gave updates on the number of complaint cases they have. Megan Kenny, the board data chair, explained that while a data report is being drafted, it awaits some updates.

“Right now I can’t [share any information], because we’re still building and making sure that the machine is tight. If you have bad data, you have bad conclusions,” said Kenny.

The board also discussed working with the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) to find better ways for officers to disarm suspects without the use of excessive violence. This came about as the board received body camera footage of a fleeing subject carrying a gun.

Joshua Harris, the board chair, said that it was extremely important for both PAB and BPD to come up with a non-lethal way to disarm people carrying weapons, imploring the PAB board to develop a strategy—along with potential policy recommendations—to address these situations. 

Police regulations allow officers to use deadly force in situations involving perceived threats. He said that while this context is important, a concern is that officers shouldn’t shoot people for carrying weapons.

“There has to be a way to de-escalate situations,” said Harris. “Figuring out what that looks like, from a policy perspective, is something I think that we’re tasked with here. [We want to] make sure that we’re creating a safer environment for everyone across the board.”

Another major point of business was discussing how to protect complaints against officers from both inside and outside the BPD.

Board members argued that the laws of police accountability should be expanded to include officer-to-officer complaints in addition to civilian-to-officer interactions. This issue was raised in response to a 2018 altercation wherein on-duty Baltimore police officer Marlon Koushall assaulted then-Sgt. Henrietta Middleton, who was off-duty. 

While a federal jury has since awarded $5.2 million to Middleton, Kenny noted that both officers remain with BPD, meaning that Middleton still has to work alongside her abuser. Board member Peter Bodde agreed with Kenny that this should have been addressed in addition to financial compensation.

“No person should ever be forced to work in an environment where these things have occurred,” said Bodde.

“[Situations like this] can have lifelong effects. It’s just wrong. That’s why we exist.”

The meeting closed on Harris reiterating the importance of data in the board’s work and speaking on further collaboration with NACOLE and other organizations such as Chicago’s COPA, along with The Engaging Center for Policing Equity. He encouraged the board to refer to these organizations as models to help PAB improve.

“We can move in that direction if we push forward, and if we educate the community and citizens about it and why it’s necessary,” Harris said.

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Youth arrests in Baltimore have declined in the last five years, according to a new report from The Sentencing Project, which argues that the current narrative around youth crime is inaccurate.

The Sentencing Project is a research and advocacy organization looking to advance “effective and humane responses to crime that minimize imprisonment and criminalization of youth and adults by promoting racial, ethnic, economic, and gender justice.”

“To be clear, any youth crime is a concern. The purpose of this report is to correct the inaccurate assertions from Baltimore’s elected prosecutor and others who would state that youth crime is ‘out of control,’” Joshua Rovner, director of youth justice with the organization, writes in the introduction of the report.

The report is based on data from the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) Juvenile Booking Data Analysis Unit. 

The numbers presented in the report don’t line up with the perception of there being a rise in youth crime and instead show a decline. There were 458 youth arrests through July 31, 2024, roughly half the number over the same time period in 2019.

“For decades, people have said crime was going up. And so looking just at the overall youth arrests, and seeing that those were down pretty significantly from before the pandemic, that was not particularly surprising to me. What was surprising to me was the scope of the drop,” Rovner said.

In 2019, 131 young people were arrested in a month on average. In 2024, the monthly average number of youth arrests was 65.

The percentage of youth arrests out of all arrests has also dropped from 10% in 2016 to 5% in 2024.

Rovner said he has been working on the data for years because of the “tension” around youth crime. 

In particular, Rovner said that a misconception on youth crime that he sought to correct originated from Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan  Bates during a July appearance on the WBAL radio show. In this interview, Bates said that “juvenile crime is out of control.” 

“I’m frankly confused at why the State’s Attorney continues to insist that youth crime is out of control. It seems to me that many politicians would, in fact, take credit for the successes that have happened in the city and highlight the fact that youth arrests are way down, and overall violence is down,” said Rovner.

James Bentley II, spokesperson for the State’s Attorney’s Office, dismissed the report’s findings in an email to Baltimore Beat.

“The Sentencing Project’s report does not accurately reflect our data nor the experiences of Baltimore City’s residents, and more importantly, completely dismisses the experiences of victims of juvenile carjackings, assaults, armed robberies, and attempted murders,” Bentley said. 

Bentley pointed to a recent Baltimore Sun story that reported a decrease in the number of juvenile carjackings as a whole this year but an increase of three juvenile armed carjackings as of September 4, 2024, compared to the total 2023 numbers. 

There were 33 total juvenile carjackings reported in Baltimore in 2023, 21 armed and 12 unarmed, and 28 juvenile carjackings in 2024, 24 armed and four unarmed, per The Sun. 

These incorrect perceptions can bring an unwarranted, increased scrutiny on teenagers, Rovner said. He added that the report found that about “five percent of arrests so far this year are teenagers while eight percent of the city’s population are teenagers.”

“Whatever image people have of crime in the city, it is not mostly being committed by what is called the juvenile population. It is mostly being committed by adults, who are not being served by the juvenile justice system,” Rovner said.

Heather Warnken, executive director of the University of Baltimore’s Center for Criminal Justice Reform, said she found the document to be very helpful and a “breath of fresh air” as a resource about the reality of youth crime. As one of Warnken’s priority areas, she said she has an understanding of how the numbers don’t align with the narrative on youth crime.

“The perception of youth crime being, ‘out of control,’ and young people driving an outside share of crime and violence just does not align with the data,” Warnken said. “ Not only are young people such a small percentage of those who were arrested and involved in the system overall, but they’re more likely to be victims than they are perpetrators of harm.” 

Warnken said a number of these misconceptions arise primarily because of media coverage that vilifies young people.

Another contributing factor Warnken and Rovner both pointed to was the rollback in the 2024 Maryland General Assembly session of bipartisan juvenile justice laws meant to limit the number of children in the legal system. 

Nate Balis, director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, said the report does a good job of utilizing police data but that it’s important young people who are in trouble are given resources and support to prevent them from being in a position where they would commit a crime again. 

“Because our goal is that they never do it again, and our goal is that they instead fill their lives with doing good things like that’s what we want. So what are we doing to increase the odds that kids will thrive, that kids will succeed, that kids will stay away from future offending? Like, that’s the whole point,” Balis said.

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