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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But the alleged brazen fraud presented staffers with a dilemma – should they call the police on the founder of their anti-police project?<\/p>\n
In the end, after being unpaid as Anderson allegedly siphoned away the money and feeling they had no other way to reclaim their wages, they resorted to telling the District of Columbia’s attorney general – who may now open a criminal probe.<\/p>\n
‘Brandon is a masculine-presenting Black person. And the way that police treat masculine-presenting Black people is terrible,’ Nancy Mariano, a former software engineer at the nonprofit, told the NYT of the dilemma.<\/p>\n
‘Even if Brandon committed a crime, I don’t want Brandon to die, so I don’t want to put Brandon in that position,’ she added – while recognizing though that he appeared to have committed ‘the perfect crime’.<\/p>\n
It was deputy director Jasmine Banks who eventually called in law enforcement to hold Anderson accountable for the alleged fraud.<\/p>\n
‘Do I have personal guilt? That’s an interesting question,’ she told a NYT interviewer, and paused for a long time. ‘No.’<\/p>\n
Raheem AI 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.<\/p>\n
‘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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Money quickly poured in, with donors giving more than $4.4 million to bolster the initiative over the course of the nonprofit’s lifetime.<\/p>\n
Anderson used the funds to hire a team, including Banks, 38, a mother-of-four with plenty of experience working for tiny liberal nonprofits.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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’.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He was so audacious about his spending that he posted a photograph of himself in a pool on Facebook, captioned ‘Cancun’.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
More at the source.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What do you do if you’re a radical leftist organization that wants to abolish the police … Woke anti-cop non-profit needs the police<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":160362,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[209,576,185,227],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-teh-stoopid","category-blm","category-crime","category-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=160361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/160362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=160361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=160361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=160361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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