AI Facial Recognition Leads to Grandmother's Wrongful Arrest and 5 Months in Jail
A Tennessee grandmother spent over five months in jail after Clearview AI facial recognition misidentified her as a fraud suspect in North Dakota — a state she had never visited...
Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old mother of three and grandmother of five, was arrested in Tennessee after an AI facial recognition system linked her to bank fraud cases in Fargo, North Dakota — over 1,000 miles from her home and a state she says she had never visited.
The West Fargo Police Department used Clearview AI, a startup with a database of billions of photos scraped from the internet, which identified Lipps as a "potential suspect with similar features" based on a fake ID used in a fraud case. That information was forwarded to Fargo police, who issued a warrant with nationwide extradition without verifying whether Lipps had ever traveled to North Dakota.
Lipps spent over three months in a Tennessee jail before being extradited — her first time on an airplane. "I was terrified and exhausted and humiliated," she wrote. It wasn't until a Fargo public defender found bank records proving she was in Tennessee during the crimes that charges were dismissed. She was released on Christmas Eve after more than five months in custody.
Fargo's police chief acknowledged "a couple of errors" but stopped short of apologizing. Her attorneys criticized what they called a lack of "basic investigative efforts," saying officers "used AI facial recognition as a shortcut for basic investigation, resulting in an innocent woman being detained and transported halfway across the country to answer for charges that she had nothing to do with."