Fargo Police Refuse To Apologize To Tennessee Grandma Jailed on Bogus AI Evidence

She spent nearly six months in jail.

A Tennessee grandmother blames AI facial recognition software for wrongfully putting her in jail for nearly half a year. It's been eight months since her arrest, and the police are only now admitting what went wrong during the investigation.

In July 2025, police arrested 50-year-old Angela Lipps for committing bank fraud in Fargo, North Dakota. Lipps claims that she has never been on an airplane, let alone to North Dakota, but AI facial recognition software identified her as a potential suspect in the case anyway, according to court documents obtained by WDAY. 

After she was deemed a fugitive from justice, Lipps spent almost four months in a Tennessee jail cell before being extradited to North Dakota, where she faced four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft. There she spent yet more time behind bars before her case was dismissed on Christmas Eve. Her defense attorney presented bank records that showed she was making purchases in Tennessee at the time police claimed she was committing fraud in North Dakota. 

In a press conference last week, Fargo Police Chief Dave Zibolski said that the Fargo Police Department, which made the arrest, does not use AI facial recognition. But its partner agency, the West Fargo Police Department, had purchased its own facial recognition software. Zibolski said that his own department "would not have allowed" the technology to be used. 

The West Fargo Police chief confirmed the software identified a "potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps." He told WZFG the "intelligence information" was then sent to the Fargo Police Department. 

According to WDAY, the software identified Lipps as a potential match for a woman withdrawing thousands of dollars using a fake military ID in a surveillance video. A Fargo detective working on the case then compared the surveillance video to Lipps' social media accounts and Tennessee driver's license photo, and she became a suspect. 

This isn't the only time law enforcement has misused facial recognition technology. The West Fargo Police Department uses Clearview AI, a company that has faced scrutiny over its collection of faceprints without consent. After the American Civil Liberties Union sued Clearview over its "unlawful, privacy-destroying surveillance activities," a settlement prohibited the company from making its "database available to most businesses and other private entities." Still, several law enforcement agencies across the country continue to use the controversial platform. In 2023, Miami cops used Clearview's facial recognition software to identify and unlawfully arrest a homeless man without probable cause. The technology has also been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to execute the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign. In June 2025, 404 Media reported that the agency had agreed to at least $3.6 million worth of contracts with the company. While these contracts were originally for tracking down undocumented immigrants, they have since been used for the federal government's mass surveillance of American citizens. 

In Angela Lipps' case, she says the misuse of the technology has caused significant losses. In addition to spending months in a jail cell, she has lost "everything," according to a GoFundMe page set up on her behalf (which has already raised $72,000). The Fargo police have declined to apologize to her for the ordeal, as the investigation is still ongoing.