Employees of an anti-police nonprofit found themselves in hot water after he remembered The 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 AIis being questioned about $250,000 in suspicious expenses he filed in 2021 alone, according to the New York Times.
The app was launched with the radical mission of abolishing the police and building an alternative network of “empowered dispatchers” made up of doctors, social workers and psychologists to answer potential 911 calls.
“Basically, it’s an alternative dispatch system to 911,” U.S. 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 fiancée Raheem, who was allegedly killed by an abusive police officer.
Brandon D. Anderson (pictured), 39, who founded a citizen app meant to help replace law enforcement officers 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 to create an app for people to report injustices they felt they had suffered at the hands of police officers.
The money came quickly, with donors giving more than $4.4 million to bolster the initiative over the nonprofit’s lifetime.
Anderson used the funds to hire a staff, including Jasmine Banks, 38, a mother of four with extensive experience working for small, liberal nonprofits.
It was Banks who discovered Anderson’s impressive spending habits — which included a $2,000 transaction at Bloomingdale’s, $2,800 at Italian luxury clothing store Bottega Veneta, and several more at Saks, Alexander McQueen and Farfetch.
According to records seen by the Times, Anderson spent more than $11,000 of charity money on designer clothes in 2021 alone. Each purchase was marked as “CEO clothing allowance.”
Banks said the first suspicious transaction she noticed was a credit card bill for $1,536. The surprising record prompted her to dig deeper into the records.
Anderson reportedly spent $46,000 on Uber and Lyft, and $80,000 on vacations and mansion rentals around the world, including a luxury resort in Cancun.
He was so bold about his spending that he posted a photo of himself in a pool on Facebook, with the caption “Cancun.”
Banks was shocked by the brazenness of the company’s apparent funneling of funds. She wrote to the nonprofit’s board — two independent members who sat alongside Anderson — about a “confidential matter that requires immediate attention.”
Anderson’s jaw-dropping spending habits 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.
Raheem AI was inspired by Anderson’s late fiancée Raheem, who was allegedly killed by an abusive police officer
Members told the Times they did not approve any clothing subsidies, 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 heads a liberal political group called Black Men Build, told the Times.
At the same time that Anderson’s spending was spiraling out of control, his employees said he was increasingly absent from work.
Meanwhile, the application they were building was failing, and when asked how the plan would 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 have placed Anderson on administrative leave and the nonprofit has been shut down as donors have withdrawn funding.
Anderson denied the allegations in a statement to the NYT, saying some were “full of untruths.”
“It’s easy to attribute failure to one cause or another in hindsight, and it’s easy to mischaracterize individual expenditures without the weight of context,” he said.
‘The point is, it just 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 meant to help replace law enforcement officers 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 Italian luxury 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 killed 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 properties in Oklahoma City.
Anderson said Raheem proposed to him in 2006, but while he was on military duty in 2007, Raheem was killed by an Oklahoma City police officer.
“He was driving a car that the police officer said was stolen,” Anderson said in previously telling the story.
‘The car was never stolen. In fact, it was the car my partner and I had saved up to buy.
‘The death of my partner threw me into two years of clinical depression. The loss of my partner — the murder of my partner — by the police changed my life forever.’
Raheem AI was born as an effort to prevent similar horrors from happening in the future by creating a nationwide network that allows people to file complaints against the police via their cell phones.
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.