GoKawiilA Tennessee grandmother spent more than five months in jail after police used an AI facial recognition tool to link her to crimes committed in North Dakota – a state she says she’d never been to before.
Police in Fargo, North Dakota, have acknowledged “a few errors” in the case and pledged changes in their operations but stopped short of issuing a direct apology.
Angela Lipps, 50, was first arrested in Tennessee on July 14, according to a statement from the Fargo Police Department and a verified GoFundMe for Lipps.
Unbeknownst to Lipps, a warrant had been issued for her arrest weeks earlier – in Fargo, over 1,000 miles away from her Tennessee home. Months before, several instances of bank fraud had occurred in and around Fargo, according to police.
In their search for a suspect in the bank fraud cases, investigators used “our partner agency’s facial recognition technology” as well as “additional investigative steps independent of AI to assist in identification” before submitting the report to the Cass County State Attorney’s Office, Fargo Police Department Chief Dave Zibolski told CNN in an email.
But Zibolski said at a Tuesday news conference that his police department’s reliance on some of the information from a neighboring agency’s AI system is “part of the issue,” referring to errors made in Lipps’ case.
“At some point, our partner agency over at West Fargo purchased their own AI facial recognition system that we were not aware of at the executive level …, and we would not have allowed that to be used, and it has since been prohibited,” he said.
The West Fargo Police Department told CNN that they use Clearview AI, a startup with a database of billions of photos scraped from the internet, including social media. Clearview “identified a potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps” and West Fargo police shared that report with Fargo police, reads a statement from the police department. The statement notes that West Fargo police didn’t forward any charges and didn’t have enough evidence to charge anyone for the fraud case in West Fargo.
CNN has reached out to Clearview AI for comment. It’s unclear what other evidence was used in the investigation to tie Lipps to the crimes.
Lipps’ case comes as police departments across the country have rapidly integrated new technologies, including AI. But police use of the novel technology has attracted criticism – and it’s been linked to other cases of misidentification.
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