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An AI system’s little oopsie, and a police department’s staggering incompetence, landed an innocent grandma in jail.
Harrowing reporting by North Dakota radio station WDAY details how the 50-year-old Angela Lipps spent nearly six months in the clink after Fargo cops using an AI facial recognition tool flagged her as a suspect in a bank fraud case in the state.
The mother of three — and grandmother of five — says she’s lived her entire life in north-central Tennessee, roughly a thousand miles away from where the crimes she was accused of committing took place. US marshals showed up at her doorstep last July while she was babysitting four kids and arrested her at gunpoint.
First, Lipps was booked in a Tennessee county jail as a fugitive from justice from North Dakota. And because she was considered a fugitive, she was held without bail and sat in the jail for nearly four initial months. Lipps received a court-appointed lawyer for the extradition process, WDAY reported, and was told she’d have to travel to North Dakota to fight the charges.
“I’ve never been to North Dakota, I don’t know anyone from North Dakota,” Lipps told the station.
According to Fargo police department files obtained by WDAY, the error arose from surveillance footage detectives viewed while investigating bank fraud cases in April and May 2025. The footage shows a woman using a fake US Army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars.
To generate leads, the detectives turned to AI facial recognition software, which identified Lipps as the person in the video.
The cops seemingly did little to verify the AI’s lead. Court documents showed that a detective agreed that the suspect’s facial features, body type, and hair were a match to Lipps. But Lipps said that no one from the Fargo police department ever called to question her.
Adding insult to injury, the Fargo police didn’t pick up Lipps from her Tennessee jail until 108 days after her arrest, after which she was flown to North Dakota to make a court appearance. The first time they interviewed her was in December, when she was being held in the North Dakota lock-up, after she had spent more than five months behind bars.
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