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 And yeah, I think that model for responder is obsolete.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.
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)
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?
Yeah, but they closed a case!!
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.
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
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.
“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.
They didn’t do due diligence. It was easily prevented by double checking everything
Heh, you said “do due”
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.
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 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%.
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.
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.
Oh, I agree with you and have similar expectations on who is going to be determined to have most if not all of the blame for it.
However the facial recognition company having to pay or not really depends on what was in the service supply contract they had with the City Of Fargo - a good contract for them can insulate them from paying even if they fucked up majorly whilst a bad contract can mean they’re liable for the mistakes of others who used their system even if their system performed entirelly within expectations.
More in general, the point I was making is that whenever one has some problem with an entity that’s providing you a service (in this case it’s not quite a “service”, but it’s similar, though this kind of thing is more commonly a situation where you’re hiring a service from some company who internally chose to outsource some of the work that goes into it and who failed to abide by the contract terms they have with you), legally it’s irrelevant for you if they’re outsourcing some or all of the work that went wrong and if they are outsourcing work who their suppliers are, and if the failure was directly from that entity or one of the suppliers - the legal responsability towards you is that entity and if they fail then THEY are the ones who have to make amends.
It’s not up to the injured party to have to worry about whatever internal organisation, work distribution and outsourcing policies and contracts the entity which has injured has in place that have led to said injury - they fucked up, they pay, and if they fucked up because they chose to outsource some or all of the work to somebody else who fucked up, well, they can’t use that as an excuse to send you in some wild goose chase after their suppliers and their suppliers’ suppliers - whatever is behind their failure in abiding by the terms they have towards you is their problem not yours.
That’s fine, yes the plaintiff should sue everyone they can as good legal practice but any claim against the facial recognition vendor gets dismissed immediately because they literally did nothing wrong. They were asked who was in a picture, it was the innocent grandma who was a victim of identity theft, and the cops went ahead and just named the victim the prime suspect for no actual reason.
How was this not like immediatly cleared up, dont people have bond hearings within the week, whos rubber stamping this shit
I wish it was acceptable to include parentheses in a sentence. I had to read the headline a couple of times to figure out a facial recognition mistake did not directly launch a $10M lawsuit. The grandma did.
Even just a couple of commas would help.
Grandmother, jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake, launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective
50 year old grandma? Hoo boy.
Have a kid at 25 -> kid has kid at 25
I do not see the problem. You could bump both of those down to 20 and she’d have a 10y/o grandkid. Multiple grandkids even.
E: Aside from all that, teen pregnancy happens, and while it’s not ideal it also doesn’t make the mother some kind of untouchable pariah.
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.
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
