A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.
In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.
I had to fix this….
Grandmother launches $10 million lawsuit after being jailed for six months due to faulty AI facial recognition.
I hope the lawsuit succeeds and stings the precinct hard.
Since the officers themselves can hide behind good faith and qualified immunity it becomes necessary to penalize the institution for hiring unprofessionals who overdepend on technology and draw their guns in advance.
It’s crap like this that fuels the movement to abolish the police. And yeah, I think that model for responder is obsolete.
The city will pay, not much else will happen.
Why are headlines these days written backwards all the time? Is this an AI generation issue, or stupid “journalism standard”?
Without punctuation, this headline implies that Grandma’s negligence with facial recognition resulting in being arrested and sued for $10 million.
I read it more like the grandma was jailed, because Fargo and detectives were hit by a $10m lawsuit due to a facial recognision mistake.
Fun fact, North Dakota (home of the idiot cop and criminally evil prosecutor) has a fewer people than the city of San Francisco in about 150,000 times the acreage. Put another way, there are about 268,000 people per electoral vote in North Dakota compared with about 728,000 people per electoral vote in California and about 670,000 people per electoral vote in Tennessee (home of the grandmother).
America. Not even once. At what cost?
I’ve heard about these things happening before.
The cops have surveillance video of a suspect, and they feed it into a face recognition AI. The AI then searches for people who look like the suspect.
It’s not finding the suspect. It’s finding pictures of people who look like the suspect. The cops are supposed to use that to determine if anyone the AI identified possibly could be the suspect.
However, any stupid, lazy cop will pretend that is sufficient and away they go.
From what I’ve read, the face matching applications even state clearly that the match doesn’t constitute any kind of proof that the person identified is actually guilty of anything. Anyone with any brains would understand that you need to have independent verification before even considering arresting someone. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t want people with brains working as cops.
This is even dumber, the suspect on camera looks nothing like the grandma.
The AI recognition instead made the mistake by comparing the known-to-be-fake ID the suspect used to the innocent grandmas face.
They dont hire cops for their brains… im not entirely sure what the credentials for cops are, but brains is probably a disqualification.
brains is probably a disqualification.
That’s what I’ve heard.
This is also on whatever hillbilly prosecutor they have in ND that didn’t immediately dismiss the charge when it came across their desk.
Hey now. Hillbillies are a proud Appalachian cultural tradition. The grandmother, being from Tennessee, might have been a hillbilly. And it might not have been an insult for her to self apply that label. The idiot cop and asshole prosecutor were in North Dakota.
Everybody in that chain should be dragged into civil court
Agreed.
Welcome to the future, you don’t have to be afraid if you didn’t do anything wrong.
(Being poorer than the 1% is defined as something wrong)
It’s “funny” how they never call it “AI” in these kinds of fail tales.
Because with AI, no bad can happen, it can only good happen.
Detective Lucas Heck proceeded with charges despite knowing that Lipps lived in Tennessee, had never visited North Dakota, did not match the physical description of the suspect captured on surveillance footage, and had no unexplained funds linking her to the thefts.
Wow, ACAB. How wildly incompetent are they?
Doesn’t a judge or DA or someone have to approve charges? Was it really all left up to one guy’s shot judgement?
the only scale any of these chucklefucks use
Yeah, but they closed a case!!
10 Million seems low to me. Cars and homes can be replaced: pets and neighbors and community cannot be replaced, they are priceless.
No. This is how you arrive at a society where most people can’t afford insurance.
A person that is wrongly incarcerated should of course be compensated for their financial losses plus a certain amount for the pain caused. But the compansation still needs to be within reason. Otherwise, insurance will skyrocket.
I mean, it already did in the US. For this exact reason. But I’d note that most countries do not give exorbiant payouts. It’s not normal and not good.
Or: If the loss of a pet is priceless, why stop at $10m, or indeed why compensate at all?
Did you even read the article? She was treated horrifically. Arrested at gunpoint in front of the children she was babysitting. Held in jail for 6 months and then taken to North Dakota 1200 miles from her home before someone even bothered to look into her alibi. She was left on the side of the street outside the jail IN NORTH DAKOTA 1200 MILES FROM WHERE SHE LIVED WITH NO MONEY OR COAT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WINTER.
She lost her home and her pet. Without the home she can’t babysit, so no livelihood. Unless there’s someone to house her and get her back on her feet, the state just took someone living a normal life and made them broke and homeless. If your primary concern is insurance rates, fuck you. Fuck you because none of this has a chance of increasing ANYONES insurance because insurance is not paying her lawsuit.
Yep. She was treated horribly. How about the responsible people are held accountable and actually go to jail, rather than this insane bullshit that just feeds the suing rat race?
They need to go to jail yes, but how does that help the now homeless victim?
I said they should be compensated for their financial losses plus extra. What I think gets ridiculous is the idea that ten million dollars wouldn’t be enough.
How much do you think would be enough if cops showed up with guns pointed at you while you were caring for children, and after six months in jail you got dumped on the side of the street with literally nothing left?
I think the state is responsible for making sure she lives a life of absolute comfort for what they did to her. If that costs $10M, then so be it. If taxpayers complain that the state is paying out these expensive suits, then the taxpayers should be seeking change.
So again, fuck you, learn some empathy.
Calm your shit now. I have empathy and sympathy as well. I have already explained to you, several times, how I think a case like this should be handled. You can stop raging now, you cringe fuck.
The solution is to require all law enforcement and justice employees to have liability insurance similar to malpractice insurance. After a couple of serious mistakes they wont be able to get insurance and therefore will no longer endanger the public.
nah, just take the judgements out of their pension fund. would see huge internal crackdown on the “bad apples” then, i imagine
Except there is no precedent for that. Liability/malpractice insurance has been around for quite a while and there would be very little chance that law enforcement/justice could argue it wasn’t ‘fair’.
Fuck you, the price for unjustly denying someone freesome (freedom) should be prohibitively expensive to deter these type of mistakes.
Community and all that other bullshit is absolutely replaceable. The one thing you actually cannot replace is time, those 6monta are lost and gone due to lazy ignorant police actions. You don’t make the consequences leas painful, you either find a method that is not as flawed as automated AI or suffer the consequences of denying innocent citizens their freedom.
the price doesnt deter them cause it’s not the police that pay for it. tie payputs like these to police pension funds if you want to see how quick they could actually fix this stuff themselves
while we’re at it, abolish the fucking PBA too.
Fucking right!!! FUCK YOU for thinking you get a union while you engage in union busting activities…
Hey, fuck you too. How about those responsible go to fucking jail, rather than offloading the burden on the public?
They need to go to jail yes, but how does that help the now homeless victim?
Insurance gets cheaper with the right plumber!
Are you speaking about that one trick that insurance companies hate?
Yes
Shit like this sucks because it’s the taxpayers that get stuck with the bill. I’m so sick of these huge companies using taxpayers to pay for everything because they dont want to spend their vast fortunes. We see the same thing with huge tax write offs for building things with the promise of more trickle down benefits.
The taxpayers vote for these idiot tough on crime prosecutors though. Whens the last time you ever heard a voter say competency and avoiding insanely dumb lawsuits was one of their top issues? It’s always jobs/crime/immigrants/other people have sex in ways i dont like. Nothing else matters to voters and that’s why shit like this keeps happening.
really need to tie these judgement payout to the police pensions, see how quickly they acrually start policing their own
The big talk lately is about making ai your public defender.
So imagine getting fasley accused of a crime and your Ai lawyer throws the case in everyway possible.
At that point we might as well make ai the judge jury and executioner.
Thanks palantir.
There’s a new Chris Pratt movie about that, which paints it in a positive light for some reason.
If you want something that engages with the idea of “an Orwellian surveillance state ruled over by something that isn’t actually AGI, but which pretends to be fair and just, and which dispenses immediate justice in the form of weapons of bodily destruction”, just watch psycho-pass, which is actually good.
Holy shit that movie sounds like hot garbage
It was, lol
Thats probably what my brain was referencing.
In an ideal world, she’d win every penny and the money would come out of the assets of each and every person involved in her arrest, including their immediate superiors so that lessons would be learned.
She lost her assets through no fault of her own. Seems only fair that they should lose theirs, if not worse, because they actually did something wrong.
That’s a bit vindictive. They probably didn’t pick the software or didn’t even know how it worked.
The idiots that did, and that trusted the facial recognition without verification, the company that made it (if it made false claims), those look more like the ones responsible.
“Oh sorry the computer says” is a fucking cop out.
“Sorry you got shot, our police officers never got firearm training.”
A woman was locked up for 6 months and lost everything, they deserve so much worse. They attempted to use software to do their work for them.
“Sorry you got shot, our police officers never got firearm training.”
I mean, that’s pretty much most USA police departments. Average training budget only gives them about 25 rounds a year per officer… if that sounds like very little, that’s because it is.
Sounds like the problem could be solved by halving the number of officers.
If you see a deleted comment I misread what you said really feels like that should be per month.
Then again firearm training doesn’t cure racism and negligence so maybe keep them poorly trained.
deleted by creator
They didn’t do due diligence. It was easily prevented by double checking everything
Heh, you said “do due”
I mean, maybe they should try harder then. It’s part of their job.
Frankly, maybe we would have less bull shit if punishment for fucking was more than “oh geeze, that was a mistake and you said sorry so it’s good.”
Also legalese weasel word bull shit that basically makes providers of services and software etc never liable need to be outlawed.
" ‘I was only following orders’ […] The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time. " - Patrick Ness
No, I’ve no idea who Patrick Ness is either, but it’s a quote from one of his works, and it happens to be true.
He just needs about treefiddy.
Now, Lipps has filed a lawsuit against the city and one of its detectives over her arrest. It alleges that Detective Lucas Heck proceeded with charges despite knowing that Lipps lived in Tennessee, had never visited North Dakota, did not match the physical description of the suspect captured on surveillance footage, and had no unexplained funds linking her to the thefts.
So the ones she’s suing. She likely can’t go after the software company because it’s very likely they just have like a confidence score and a legal thing that says “when you use this we’re just providing an estimate and possible match and you need to do your diligence.” But the fact the state/city/department has no policy that more corroborating evidence is required for an arrest / jail and that detective just blanket trusted the software without any other evidence means they should be the primary targets of the lawsuit. Additionally this is ripe for political candidates to take on, so I’m surprised she hasn’t gotten some politician using her as an example for more stringent policies in the use of facial recognition by law enforcement.
The companies that run this facial recognition should be the ones to pay first and foremost. The villains never pay themselves, we are paying victims from the taxes of the victims.
The cops gave the software company a fake id and said “anybody look like this picture in this fake ID?”. Then the software company says “yeah that picture on the fake ID looks a lot like this grandma in tennesee.”
That’s on the cops 100%.
The way these things work it’s up to the City Of Fargo to, after paying $10 million to this lady, go after the supplier they hired for the facial recognition service because it was not up to claimed standards and resulted in such losses for the City Of Fargo.
What did the facial recognition do wrong though? The cops gave them a known fake ID and asked them does this look like anybody. Well, that fake ID did look like the innocent grandma in Tennessee. (Btw the surveillance footage of the actual suspect looked nothing like the fake ID or the innocent grandma.)
The FR service didn’t do anything wrong, the cops just took what was supposed to be an alert to a possible victim of identity theft, and turned it into a false arrest and kidnapping.
It’s like if you reported a crime and you tell the cops that the victims name is Jean Smith, and then they just go arrest her and throw her in jail for six months.
And, ideally, when the City of Fargo has to eat the cost (because the contract with the tech company likely specifies that a facial recognition match is not sufficient grounds for arrest), it and every other municipality using similar tech will change its policing practices.
But probably the city will just quietly take responsibility for the damages after a session of contractually required private mediation, and nobody will learn a lesson.
I mean while they should be punished for their involvement, the CV didn’t keep her in prison for six months
Even so, they oversold the effectiveness you can be sure.
And the state? They jailed her with insufficient proof.
they jailed her with pretty much no proof, pretty much a call from north dakota sayin “go arrest this grandma”
Buried in the article, it came out that the face they used as “proof” was the picture on the FAKE ID that the actual suspect used. They did exactly 0 investigative work. The computer spat out a picture with a name and they just went in guns drawn.
In front of kids.
The only “good” part I guess is that they didn’t shoot her or the kids.
yep, I know. All this, but the lawsuit, broke a couple months ago.
the lawsuit is the only new bit of information in the story
Yes.
