Woke nonprofit staff who want to abolish police left in stunning bind after discovering founder ‘blew fortune of charity cash on designer clothes and mansions’
Workers at an anti-police nonprofit are in hot water after its woke founder reportedly 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, the New York Times.
The app was launched with the radical mission of abolishing the police and creating an alternative network of “liberated dispatchers” made up of doctors, social workers and psychologists who could answer 911 calls.
“Essentially, it’s an alternative dispatch system to 911,” Anderson, an Army veteran, said when the initiative launched in 2021. He paid himself a salary of $160,000.
The project was inspired by Anderson’s late fiancé Raheem, who was reportedly murdered by an abusive police officer.
Brandon D. Anderson (pictured), 39, who founded a citizen app aimed at replacing law enforcement officers called Raheem AI, is being questioned about $250,000 in suspicious expenses he filed in 2021 alone, the New York Times reported.
Whistleblower Jasmine Banks, who worked at the nonprofit, was the first to notice the suspicious transactions
It was a repeat of an earlier failed attempt to create an app that would allow people to report police abuse.
The money poured in quickly, with donors donating more than $4.4 million to support the initiative over the life of the nonprofit.
Anderson used the money to hire a team, including Jasmine Banks, 38, a mother of four with extensive experience working for small, liberal nonprofits.
It was Banks who exposed Anderson’s astonishing spending habits, which included a $2,000 transaction at Bloomingdale’s and $2,800 at the Italian luxury clothing store Bottega Veneta. He also made many more at Saks, Alexander McQueen and Farfetch.
According to data seen by the NYT, Anderson spent more than $11,000 of his charity money on designer clothes in 2021 alone, with each purchase marked as a “director’s clothing allowance.”
Banks said the first suspicious transaction she noticed was a credit card bill for $1,536. The eyebrow-raising details prompted her to dig deeper into the data.
Anderson reportedly spent $46,000 on Uber and Lyft, and $80,000 on vacations and mansion rentals around the world, including a luxury resort vacation in Cancun.
He was so brazen with his spending that he posted a photo of himself in a swimming pool on Facebook with the caption “Cancun.”
Banks was stunned by the audacity of the apparent funneling of corporate 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 staggering spending spree 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 is inspired by Anderson’s late fiancée Raheem, who was reportedly murdered by an abusive police officer
Members told the NYT they had not approved any clothing allowances, especially since the entire workforce was working from home.
“No, no, no. Categorically no. Not in a million years,” Phillip Agnew, a former board member who now leads a liberal political group called Black Men Build, told the NYT.
As Anderson’s expenses spiraled, his employees told him he was increasingly absent from work.
Meanwhile, the app they were building failed, and when asked how the plan would be executed, he blamed them.
“He said that’s why he hired smart people, so we could tell him,” Banks told the NYT.
After the allegations came to light, board members suspended Anderson and the nonprofit went bankrupt after donors withdrew funding.
Anderson denied the allegations in a statement to the NYT, saying some of the allegations were “rife with falsehoods.”
“In hindsight, it’s easy to attribute failure to one cause or another, and individual expenses can easily be misinterpreted if you don’t know the context,” he said.
“The bottom line is it just didn’t work, and as the leader of that effort, I bear the brunt of the blame for that.”
Brandon D. Anderson (pictured), 39, who founded a citizen app aimed at replacing law enforcement officers called Raheem AI, is being questioned about $250,000 in suspicious expenses he filed in 2021 alone, the New York Times reported.
Anderson’s staggering spending spree 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 is named after his fiancée Raheem, who was allegedly murdered by an abusive police officer.
He often told the story of how they ran away from home together as teenagers and sold drugs to survive while living in abandoned buildings in Oklahoma City.
Anderson said Raheem proposed to him in 2006, but that Raheem was killed by an Oklahoma City police officer in 2007 while he was on an Army tour.
“He was driving a car that the officer said was stolen,” Anderson previously said of the story.
‘The car was never stolen. It was actually the car my partner and I had been saving up to buy.
“The death of my partner threw me into a clinical depression for two years. The loss of my partner — the murder of my partner — at the hands of the police changed my life forever.”
Raheem AI was created in an attempt to prevent similar atrocities from happening in the future, by setting up a nationwide network that allows people to file complaints against the police using their phones.
This ultimately failed due to the complexity of the task, but was resumed in 2021 with the new mission.
DailyMail.com has reached out to Anderson for comment.