A Tennessee grandmother has been sentenced to five months in prison after a facial recognition system incorrectly identified her as a suspect in a bank fraud case in a state where she had never set foot.
Angela Lipps, 50, was first apprehended at her rental home in July of the previous year. By the end of October, she had been extradited over 1,000 miles away to Fargo, North Dakota, according to information from a GoFundMe account set up on her behalf.
The West Fargo Police Department utilized facial recognition technology that mistakenly tagged Lipps as a potential fraud suspect, as confirmed by Dave Zibolski, Chief of the Fargo Police Department, in an interview with CNN. He noted that the department took additional investigative measures apart from the AI system to independently verify Lipps’ identity as linked to the case.
During a recent press conference, Zibolski acknowledged that the AI system used by West Fargo law enforcement played a significant role in Lipps’ erroneous arrest.
The police department clarified to CNN that they employed Clearview AI, which detected a person resembling Lipps as a possible suspect.
Lipps was held in Tennessee for three months due to miscommunication from the Cass County Sheriff’s Office, which failed to inform their North Dakota counterparts that they had secured her extradition waiver.
Lipps lamented that her relocation to North Dakota marked her first-ever flight on an airplane. She stated it would be both her first and last visit to the Peace Garden State.
By the time she arrived in Fargo, Lipps recounted feeling terrified, exhausted, and humiliated, as documented in her GoFundMe account.
Once in Fargo, she was assigned a lawyer who secured bank documentation indicating she was in Tennessee at the relevant time of the alleged fraud.
“It took merely five minutes for everything to unravel. Just five minutes,” Lipps remarked on her fundraising page.
On December 23, a little over five months following her arrest, a detective, the state’s attorney, and a judge collectively decided to dismiss the allegations against Lipps without prejudice to allow room for ongoing inquiries, according to the Fargo police.
Although Lipps was released on Christmas Eve, she found herself in a precarious situation. During her time in custody, her reputation suffered, she lost her rental home, and all her belongings were taken when she could not pay the bill for her storage unit, as stated in her fundraising campaign.
“I am not the same person I used to be. I doubt I ever will be,” Lipps expressed.
Her fundraiser had achieved a total of $68,000 by Sunday, March 29.
In response to the incident, Zibolski assured that the Fargo Police Department would cease using information from West Fargo’s Clearview AI, as its operation and oversight remained unclear to them.
He also stated that all facial recognition matches would now be reviewed monthly by the attention of the Investigation Division commander to monitor this developing technology more effectively.
Zibolski conceded that the department should have referred surveillance images related to the fraud cases to specialized agencies with training in facial recognition.
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