Brandon Anderson (entrepreneur) facts for kids

Brandon D. Anderson is an American sociologist and entrepreneur. He started a special chatbot called Raheem.ai. This chatbot was designed to help people report their experiences with police officers. In 2018, he was recognized as an Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow, and in 2019, he became a TED fellow.

Early Life and Background

Brandon Anderson was born in Oklahoma. His mother worked as a rental car clerk, and his father was a forklift truck driver. He has shared that his childhood included difficult times. As a teenager, he became homeless. Anderson joined the Army in 2003, where he worked with satellites.

Education and Community Work

After his time in the Army, Anderson became involved in community work. He earned a degree from Georgetown University in 2015, where he studied sociology and philosophy. He also worked at the Washington, D.C. Center for the Study of Social Policy, focusing on fairness for different groups of people. Anderson learned that many people do not report negative experiences with police because they do not trust the system.

Creating Raheem.ai

In 2014, Anderson received funding to create Raheem.ai. This was a chatbot that worked through Facebook Messenger. Its goal was to make it easier for people to report issues with police. The chatbot allowed people to share their experiences and offered support. Raheem.ai was inspired by apps like Waze, which uses information from users to help local governments.

The chatbot asked questions about recent interactions with police. It then made the collected information anonymous and shared it on a public dashboard. This dashboard showed how police were performing. Raheem.ai published reports about where police were doing well and where they needed to improve. Anderson hoped to create the first large database of police interactions using information from the public.

In 2016, Anderson gave a TED talk at Georgetown University. He was also named one of the 100 Black LGBTQ/SGL Emerging Leaders by the National Black Justice Coalition. In 2018, he became an Echoing Green Fellow.

Challenges and Scrutiny

However, Raheem.ai faced a big challenge. There are thousands of police departments in the United States, and each has its own way of handling complaints. Raheem.ai struggled to create a single system that worked for all of them.

In August 2024, an article in The New York Times by David Fahrenthold discussed the difficulties Raheem.ai faced. The article explained that while the website collected many stories from users, it could not easily send these complaints directly to police departments. This meant the system did not have the impact Anderson hoped for.

Mr. Anderson's complaint system — "Yelp for police," he called it — did not work. His website collected more than 2,700 stories from users about their interactions with police — accounts of unjustified traffic stops, physical assaults and harassment. But the work had little impact because Raheem was unable to solve a mind-bending technical problem.

There are 18,000 police departments in America. Some accept complaints online, but many require people to make a phone call or go to a police station. Raheem failed because it never offered a one-stop way for users to file their complaints directly with police.

[...] For now, his nonprofit appears legally active, but functionally dead. Several donors pulled their funding. Three employees were left out of work.

The article also raised questions about some of Anderson's financial practices while leading Raheem.ai. The Washington DC Attorney General's Office later filed a lawsuit. They stated that Anderson and Raheem.ai misused funds. In November 2024, Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb sued Raheem AI and Brandon Anderson. The lawsuit claimed that Anderson used the nonprofit's money for his own personal benefit. It also stated that the organization did not manage its spending properly. Additionally, the lawsuit mentioned that Raheem AI did not pay its only employee in the District of Columbia the wages she had earned.