Employees at an anti-police nonprofit have been left in a bind after their woke founder allegedly blew hundreds of thousands of dollars on designer clothes and mansions for himself.
Brandon D. Anderson, 39, who founded a citizen app intended to replace law enforcement called Raheem AI, is being questioned about $250,000 in suspicious expenses he submitted in 2021 alone, according to the New York Times.
The app was launched with a radical mission to abolish the police and build an alternative network of ‘liberated dispatchers’ comprising medics, social workers and psychologists to take would-be 911 calls.
‘Essentially, it’s an alternative dispatching system to 911,’ US Army veteran Anderson said when the initiative began in 2021. He paid himself a salary of $160,000.
The project was inspired by Anderson’s late fiancee Raheem, who was allegedly killed by an abusive cop.
Brandon D. Anderson (pictured), 39, who founded a citizen app intended to help replace law enforcement officials called Raheem AI , is being questioned about $250,000 in suspicious expenses he submitted 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 an earlier failed attempt at creating an app for people to report wrongs they felt they had suffered at the hands of police officers.
Money quickly poured in, with donors giving more than $4.4 million to bolster the initiative over the course of the nonprofit’s lifetime.
Anderson used the funds to hire a team, including Jasmine Banks, 38, a mother-of-four with plenty of experience working for tiny liberal nonprofits.
It was Banks who uncovered Anderson’s jaw-dropping spending habits – which included a $2,000 transaction at Bloomingdale’s $2,800 at luxury Italian clothing store Bottega Veneta, and many more at Saks, Alexander McQueen, and Farfetch.
According to records seen by the NYT, Anderson spent upwards of $11,000 in charity money on designer clothing in 2021 alone. Each purchase was marked ‘executive director clothing allowance’.
Banks said the first suspicious transaction she noticed was a $1,536 credit card bill. The eyebrow-raising record prompted her to dig further into the records.
Anderson allegedly spent $46,000 on Uber and Lyft, and $80,000 on vacations and hiring mansions around the world, including a luxury resort holiday in Cancun.
He was so audacious about his spending that he posted a photograph of himself in a pool on Facebook, captioned ‘Cancun’.
Banks was stunned by the brazenness of the apparent funneling of company funds. She wrote to the nonprofit’s board – two independent members who sat alongside Anderson – about a ‘confidential issue that requires immediate attention’.
Anderson’s jaw-dropping spending habits included a $2,000 transaction at Bloomingdale’s $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 fiancee Raheem, who was allegedly killed by an abusive cop
The members told the NYT they had not approved any clothing allowances, especially since the entire workforce worked from home.
‘No, no, no. Categorically, no. 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.
At the same time that Anderson’s spending was spiraling out of control, his employees said he was increasingly absent from work.
Meanwhile, the app they were building was failing, and when asked about how the plan was going to be executed, he would pass the buck to them.
‘He would say that’s why he hired smart people, so we could tell him,’ Banks told the NYT.
Since the allegations came to light, the board members have placed Anderson on administrative leave and the nonprofit has become defunct as donors pulled funding.
Anderson denied the accusations in a statement to the NYT, saying that some were ‘rife with untruths’.
‘It’s easy to assign failure to one cause or another in hindsight, and individual expenditures 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 intended to help replace law enforcement officials called Raheem AI , is being questioned about $250,000 in suspicious expenses he submitted in 2021 alone, according to the New York Times
Anderson’s jaw-dropping spending habits included a $2,000 transaction at Bloomingdale’s $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 fiancee Raheem, who was allegedly killed by an abusive cop.
He often told the story about how they had run away from home together as teenagers and sold drugs to survive while squatting inside abandoned properties in Oklahoma City.
Anderson said Raheem proposed to him in 2006, but while he was away on army tour in 2007, Raheem was killed by an Oklahoma City Police officer.
‘He was driving a car that the officer said was stolen,’ Anderson said while telling the story previously.
‘The car had never been stolen. In fact, it was the car that me and my partner had saved up to buy.
‘My partner’s death threw me into two years of clinical depression. The loss of my partner — the killing of my partner — by the police changed my life forever.’
Raheem AI was born as an effort to prevent similar horrors from happening in future, by creating a nationwide network which allows people to file complaints against police from their phone.
This ultimately failed due to the complexity of the task at hand but was revamped with the new mission in 2021.
DailyMail.com has reached out to Anderson for comment.