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 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 And yeah, I think that model for responder is obsolete.
I had to fix this….
Grandmother launches $10 million lawsuit after being jailed for six months due to faulty AI facial recognition.
America. Not even once. At what cost?
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.
I read it more like the grandma was jailed, because Fargo and detectives were hit by a $10m lawsuit due to a facial recognision mistake.
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 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
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)
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.
One of these cops is going to fuck with the wrong person, and instead of getting sued, they’ll get shot.
And all I will say to that is: if that happens, you want me on your jury.
There’s probably a reason why the copAI seems to lean towards women and grandmothers.
- Suspect 1 95% John Gunfinger
- Suspect 2 94% Mrs. Abuelita
Uhhhh better run that again…
- Suspect 1 95% Mrs. Abuelita
- Suspect 1 94% John Gunfinger.
OK, let’s take her down.
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
Agreed.
They dont hire cops for their brains… im not entirely sure what the credentials for cops are, but brains is probably a disqualification.
brains is probably a disqualification.
That’s what I’ve heard.
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
The big talk lately is about making ai your public defender.
So imagine getting fasley accused of a crime and your Ai lawyer throws the case in everyway possible.
At that point we might as well make ai the judge jury and executioner.
Thanks palantir.
There’s a new Chris Pratt movie about that, which paints it in a positive light for some reason.
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.
Holy shit that movie sounds like hot garbage
It was, lol
Thats probably what my brain was referencing.
I remember this story.
This is why facial recognition is bullshit.
Damn, that’s the type of shit that makes one want to rob a bank just hearing about it
Rob a bank? Go to jail.
Don’t rob a bank? Beleive it or not, straight to jail
