Anti-Police Activist Spent Charity Money on Travel, Clothes

An anti-police activist named Brandon Anderson has been charged with spending $75,000 of the money he raised though a charity on himself. The alleged fraud was detected by his deputy director when she noticed Anderson had charged $1,500 to cover a hotel bill. Looking back through the group’s financial records, she noticed lots of other charges that seemed like they had no connection to the group’s stated goals.

She dug deeper into the nonprofit’s bank records and found much more that concerned her. Mansion rentals. Vet bills. Luxury clothes. Finally, a stay at a Cancun resort. Ms. Banks scrolled back through Facebook to the week that resort bill was paid. She saw her boss, Brandon D. Anderson, posing in a pool.

The photo was tagged: “Cancun.”…

In early 2021, he used its funds to go on a shopping spree.

He spent $2,000 at Bloomingdale’s. Then $2,800 at Bottega Veneta, an upscale Italian clothing store. After that: Saks, Alexander McQueen, and the online luxury-goods store Farfetch.

Anderson claimed the clothing expenses were approved by his charity’s board but the board members deny that. Now the Washington, DC Attorney General has sued Anderson, seeking to shutter his organization and prevent him from running any others in the city.

Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb, an elected Democrat who oversees nonprofits in the city, said Brandon Anderson had turned an anti-police-brutality charity called Raheem AI into a piggy bank for himself.

Mr. Schwalb also sued Raheem AI. He asked a judge to shutter the organization, bar Mr. Anderson from leading any other Washington nonprofit and order Mr. Anderson or Raheem AI to repay the $75,000. The money would then be given to a charity chosen by the judge.

“Brandon Anderson misused charitable donations to fund lavish vacations and shopping sprees, and the Raheem AI board of directors let him get away with it,” Mr. Schwalb said in a written statement. He continued, “My office will not allow people to masquerade behind noble causes while violating the law.”

There’s another level of fraud going on here. Brandon Anderson’s backstory is that he was kicked out the house as a teenager and ran away with his best friend Raheem. He claimed that he and Raheem feel in love and planned to marry but Anderson joined the Army and while he was enlisted, Raheem was killed by Oklahoma City police.

“He was driving a car that the officer said was stolen. The car had never been stolen. In fact, it was the car that me and my partner had saved up to buy,” he said in one interview. “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.”

It was this backstory that made Anderson a credible figure among the anti-police left. He was a victim of police violence. It also explained his first project, which was called Raheem AI. It was designed to collect complaints about police and funnel them to the proper agencies as a way to create change. But it never worked. There were too many police agencies and no standardized way to file complaints.

More significantly, the story about Raheem doesn’t seem to be true. 

Seeking to verify his account, The Times examined records kept by the Oklahoma state medical examiner and the Tulsa World news organization, which has tracked police killings in the state since 2007. The Times found no evidence of the killing that Mr. Anderson has described. No homicide in the entire state of Oklahoma involved a man named Raheem, nor did any match the particulars of the officer-involved death Mr. Anderson had described.

It’s not clear if there was a Raheem or if any of Anderson’s backstory is true, but it seems the core of his tragic backstory isn’t supported by evidence.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this sort of thing. The founders of BLM bought expensive homes, supposedly for the movement, which wound up being used for parties and filming personal YouTube videos. Last month a BLM activist in Toledo was sentenced to 42 months in prison for wire fraud and money laundering. A BLM activist in London was sentenced for fraud after moving nearly $40,000 in charity funds into her personal bank account. Boston BLM activists Monica Cannon-Grant and her husband Clark Grant were charged with spending charity funds on themselves. All that to say, this is not the first time we’ve seen this type of fraud crop up among anti-police activists.