Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Everybody should just periodically read random court cases, this stuff has always been extremely common and the sop when the mistakes are uncovered is to double down, just attempt to fully bury the innocent person in the system. This is a daily occurrence in every single state in the US.
There was a black dude in detroit that got falsely accused, and despite having an alibi and it clearly not being him they tried to make it stick anyway. That was a few years back.
Real talk, I just saw a quick video about how the mythbusters proved two dudes didn’t start a fire they were tortured into signing a confession for. They got a hearing and it was shown that the sheriff had a history of putting innocent people away. And after they were PROVEN FUCKING INNOCENT, they still spent another 17 years in jail!!!
I sat on a jury for a murder trial a few years ago. It’s incredible how sloppy it all felt.
Real life is absolutely not Law & Order where the top cops and prosecutors have a perfect case of evidence and then the killer confesses.
Two things that stuck out, witnesses in the car, all gave basically the same account, but not one gave the same drugs they picked up at the time they stopped for drugs.
The defense couldn’t quite decide which direction the car was facing in relation to the other vehicle (it was a drive by)
Also they had a video from a gas station they stopped at. And it was like… I guess that is a person, it’s not obvious if it’s anyone involved in this case.” Because it’s a cheap gas station camera on a roof, not some perfect HD zoom zoom enhance image.
You are gone for six months, what are they going to do? Leave the dog to starve to death? The local pound or some other animal rescue organization picked them up and (hopefully) re-homed them (or otherwise put them down)
Someone would have to know she has a dog. Presumably, the dog could be picked up by a family member or friend. The article doesn’t specify what happened.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
You can’t absolve the tech companies here, they know their system is fallable (is too a word, any word can be abled as such, microsoft is not the arbiter of language,) and they pretend it’s not.
I mean what did they do wrong here? They didn’t tell the cops anything other than the picture of the the victim if identity theft looked like the actual victim of identity theft.
The cops are the ones who switched the victim and the suspect for no reason.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Youre the cringe one talking about freaking insurance costs in an thread about a poor grandma being taken by the state and left in the street to die thousands of miles from her home.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
