Employees of an anti-police nonprofit have found themselves in hot water after its progressive founder allegedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on designer clothes and mansions for himself.
Brandon D. Anderson, 39, who founded a citizen app aimed at replacing law enforcement called Raheem AI, is being questioned about $250,000 in suspicious expenses he filed in 2021 alone, according to the The New York Times.
The app was launched with the radical mission of abolishing the police and building an alternative network of “liberated dispatchers” that includes doctors, social workers and psychologists to handle potential 911 calls.
“It’s basically an alternative dispatch system to 911,” Anderson, a U.S. Army veteran, said when the initiative began in 2021. A salary of $160,000 was paid.
The project was inspired by Anderson’s late fiancée, Raheem, who was allegedly murdered by an abusive police officer.
Brandon D. Anderson (pictured), 39, who founded a citizen app aimed at helping replace law enforcement officers called Raheem AI, is being questioned over $250,000 in suspicious expenses he filed in 2021 alone, according to the New York Times.
Whistleblower Jasmine Banks, who worked at the nonprofit, was the first to notice the suspicious transactions.
It was an iteration of a previous failed attempt to create an app for people to report grievances they felt they had suffered at the hands of police officers.
The money came quickly, with donors donating more than $4.4 million to bolster the initiative throughout the nonprofit’s existence.
Anderson used the funds to hire a team, including Jasmine Banks, 38, a mother of four with plenty of experience working for small, liberal nonprofits.
It was Banks who uncovered Anderson’s astonishing spending habits, which included a $2,000 transaction at Bloomingdale’s, $2,800 at Italian luxury clothing store Bottega Veneta, and many more at Saks, Alexander McQueen and Farfetch.
According to records seen by the NYT, Anderson spent more than $11,000 in charity money on designer clothing in 2021 alone. Each purchase was marked as “CEO clothing allowance.”
Banks said the first suspicious transaction she noticed was a $1,536 credit card bill. The surprising record prompted her to dig deeper into the records.
Anderson allegedly spent $46,000 on Uber and Lyft, and $80,000 on vacations and mansion rentals around the world, including a vacation to a luxury resort in Cancun.
He was so bold with his spending that he posted a photograph of himself in a pool on Facebook, with the caption “Cancun.”
Banks was stunned by the brazenness of the company’s apparent misappropriation of funds. She wrote to the nonprofit’s board of directors — two independent members who sat alongside Anderson — about a “confidential matter requiring immediate attention.”
Anderson’s astonishing spending habits included a $2,000 transaction at Bloomingdale’s for $2,800 at luxury Italian clothing store Bottega Veneta, and many more at Saks, Alexander McQueen and Farfetch.
Raheem AI was inspired by Anderson’s late fiancée, Raheem, who was allegedly murdered by an abusive police officer.
Members told the NYT that they had not approved any allocation for clothing, especially since the entire workforce was working from home.
“No, no, no. Absolutely not. Not in a million years,” Phillip Agnew, a former board member who now runs a liberal political group called Black Men Build, told the NYT.
As Anderson’s spending spiraled out of control, his employees said he was increasingly absent from work.
Meanwhile, the application they were building was failing, and when they asked him how the plan was going to be executed, he passed the buck to them.
“He said that’s why he hired smart people, so we could tell him,” Banks told the NYT.
Since the allegations came to light, board members placed Anderson on administrative leave and the nonprofit became inactive as donors withdrew funding.
Anderson denied the allegations in a statement to the NYT, saying some were “riddled with falsehoods.”
“In retrospect, it’s easy to attribute failure to one cause or another, and individual expenses are easy to mischaracterize without the burden of context,” he said.
“The bottom line is simply that it didn’t work, and as the leader of that effort, I share most of the blame.”
Brandon D. Anderson (pictured), 39, who founded a citizen app aimed at helping replace law enforcement officers called Raheem AI, is being questioned over $250,000 in suspicious expenses he filed in 2021 alone, according to the New York Times.
Anderson’s astonishing spending habits included a $2,000 transaction at Bloomingdale’s for $2,800 at luxury Italian clothing store Bottega Veneta, and many more at Saks, Alexander McQueen and Farfetch.
Anderson’s nonprofit was named after his fiancée Raheem, who was allegedly killed by an abusive police officer.
He often told the story of how they had run away from home together as teenagers and sold drugs to survive while squatting in abandoned properties in Oklahoma City.
Anderson said Raheem proposed to her in 2006, but while on a military tour in 2007, Raheem was killed by an Oklahoma City police officer.
“I was driving a car that the officer said was stolen,” Anderson said in recounting the story earlier.
‘The car had never been stolen. In fact, it was the car my partner and I had saved up to buy.
“The death of my partner plunged me into clinical depression for two years. The loss of my partner, his murder, at the hands of the police changed my life forever.”
Raheem AI was born in an effort to prevent similar horrors from happening in the future, creating a nationwide network that allows people to file complaints against police from their phones.
This ultimately failed due to the complexity of the task at hand, but was renewed with the new mission in 2021.
DailyMail.com has contacted Anderson for comment.
