A Tennessee grandmother is suing the city of Fargo, North Dakota, and its police department, alleging she was wrongfully detained for nearly six months after authorities misused artificial intelligence facial-recognition technology while investigating a bank theft case.
Angela Lipps, 50, of Elizabethton, Tennessee, said she was caring for four young children belonging to a neighbor when police arrived at the home and arrested her at gunpoint in July 2025.
The complaint, filed Sept. 15, 2026, alleges that authorities relied solely on a flawed AI facial-recognition match to extradite Lipps from Tennessee to North Dakota, even though she had no connection to the state or the alleged crime.
Police technology experts told News Media that the case is one of more than a dozen known incidents involving alleged law-enforcement mishandling of facial-recognition tools.
“I sat in a county jail in Tennessee for 108 days,” Lipps wrote in a GoFundMe post. “They said I was fugitive from justice. I had no bail. No one interviewed me. I just sat and waited.”
Lipps said she spent 108 days in a Tennessee jail before being extradited to North Dakota and eventually cleared. (City of Fargo/GoFundMe)
The investigation began after an unknown woman allegedly used fake identification and stolen identities to commit bank fraud in Fargo and West Fargo, North Dakota, in April and May 2025, according to the lawsuit.
According to prosecutors, investigators used a photograph from a fraudulent identification card submitted by the suspect—not surveillance footage—to conduct facial-recognition searches through Clearview AI.
Clearview AI expressly requires its facial-recognition results to be treated as investigative leads. However, Fargo police allegedly described the result as a positive identification without disclosing that it had not been independently confirmed, the complaint states.
West Fargo police, by contrast, reportedly declined to pursue charges because the AI match had not been corroborated.
A West Fargo police captain described AI facial recognition as “close to a last-ditch effort” in investigations, according to the lawsuit.
Lipps said police overlooked evidence showing she was hundreds of miles away when the North Dakota bank thefts occurred. (City of Fargo/GoFundMe)
The complaint alleges that Detective Lucas Heck failed to review Lipps’ financial and travel records, which showed she was in Tennessee at the time of the thefts. It also says he did not conduct photo lineups with bank tellers. Surveillance video reportedly revealed physical differences between Lipps and the suspect, including a different build and a neck tattoo visible on Lipps but absent from the suspect.
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“Heck ignored, concealed, and misrepresented exculpatory evidence that Lipps did not commit the bank thefts,” the complaint alleged.
On July 14, 2025, U.S. Marshals surrounded a neighbor’s home in Tennessee and arrested Lipps at gunpoint under a nationwide warrant, prosecutors said.
Lipps was extradited to North Dakota and held on $100,000 bond while facing eight felony charges. The most serious charges carried maximum prison sentences of up to 10 years.
Prosecutors dismissed all charges on Dec. 24, 2025, after Lipps presented bank records showing she was in Tennessee when the thefts took place, prosecutors said.
“When she was released, she found that her residence, car, and personal property were lost while she was absent,” the complaint stated.
Fargo officials later acknowledged investigative errors involving the police department’s use of facial-recognition technology. (City of Fargo/GoFundMe)
After the case drew public scrutiny, the Fargo Police Department and the city acknowledged at a March 2026 news conference that investigators had made errors.
“When chief found some errors that were made in this area of where we got our facial recognition and how that worked, we immediately addressed it,” Mayor Tim Mahoney said.
Clare Garvie, the deputy director of Technology Law & Policy with the Policing Project, told News Media that incidents involving the alleged mishandling of AI have increased as law enforcement agencies adjust to “integrate AI and additional tools into police investigations.”
“We are aware of 16 misidentifications stemming from a face recognition match where someone was wrongfully arrested and spent time in jail because of that misidentification, and in many of these cases, it was because additional investigative steps weren’t taken to prove, or in these cases to disprove, the face recognition match,” Garvie said in an interview.
“We’re asking officers to do a different job now, such that we need to update how we think about these workflows,” she added.
In an interview with News Media, Nate Freed-Wessler, a deputy director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the rise of artificial intelligence in law enforcement has fueled wrongful arrests across the country.
“We’ve been seeing these kinds of wrongful arrests happening for at least five or six years now out of this kind of AI technology. And the rate of them seems to be increasing,” he said.
“We’ve seen cases where police intentionally avoid making any notes about their use of facial recognition technology or other AI.”
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