Police used AI facial recognition to arrest a Tennessee woman for crimes committed in a state she says she’s never visited

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(CNN) — A Tennessee grandmother spent more than five months in jail after police used an AI facial recognition tool to link her to crimes committed in North Dakota – a state she says she’d never been to before.

Police in Fargo, North Dakota, have acknowledged “a few errors” in the case and pledged changes in their operations but stopped short of issuing a direct apology.

Angela Lipps, 50, was first arrested in Tennessee on July 14, according to a statement from the Fargo Police Department and a verified GoFundMe for Lipps.

Unbeknownst to Lipps, a warrant had been issued for her arrest weeks earlier – in Fargo, over 1,000 miles away from her Tennessee home. Months before, several instances of bank fraud had occurred in and around Fargo, according to police.

In their search for a suspect in the bank fraud cases, investigators used “our partner agency’s facial recognition technology” as well as “additional investigative steps independent of AI to assist in identification” before submitting the report to the Cass County State Attorney’s Office, Fargo Police Department Chief Dave Zibolski told CNN in an email.

But Zibolski said at a Tuesday news conference that his police department’s reliance on some of the information from a neighboring agency’s AI system is “part of the issue,” referring to errors made in Lipps’ case.

“At some point, our partner agency over at West Fargo purchased their own AI facial recognition system that we were not aware of at the executive level …, and we would not have allowed that to be used, and it has since been prohibited,” he said.

The West Fargo Police Department told CNN that they use Clearview AI, a startup with a database of billions of photos scraped from the internet, including social media. Clearview “identified a potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps” and West Fargo police shared that report with Fargo police, reads a statement from the police department. The statement notes that West Fargo police didn’t forward any charges and didn’t have enough evidence to charge anyone for the fraud case in West Fargo.

CNN has reached out to Clearview AI for comment. It’s unclear what other evidence was used in the investigation to tie Lipps to the crimes.

Lipps’ case comes as police departments across the country have rapidly integrated new technologies, including AI. But police use of the novel technology has attracted criticism – and it’s been linked to other cases of misidentification.

‘Terrified and exhausted and humiliated’

On July 1, a North Dakota judge signed a warrant for Lipps’ arrest, with nationwide extradition. She was arrested July 14 and spent over three months in a Tennessee jail before being extradited, according to Fargo police and her lawyers.

It wasn’t until October that Tennessee law enforcement told the Cass County Sheriff’s Office in North Dakota they had Lipps’ extradition waiver. She was facing multiple charges, including felony theft and felony unauthorized use of personal identifying information, according to her lawyers.

It’s unclear why it took so long for Tennessee authorities to notify their North Dakota counterparts about Lipps’ arrest. Lipps’ attorneys told CNN they “have seen a July 14, 2025 email notifying various North Dakota law enforcement personnel that Angela had been arrested in Tennessee.”

Fargo police, alternately, told CNN, “We have been unable to determine based on available information if the length of time Ms. Lipps was in jail in Tennessee before being transported to North Dakota was due to serving time for a probation violation or if it was because she fought extradition.”

CNN has reached out to Tennessee authorities for comment.

Lipps’ extradition to North Dakota, she said in her GoFundMe, was terrifying: “It was the first time I had ever been on an airplane,” she wrote. “I was terrified and exhausted and humiliated.”

In Fargo, she was given a lawyer who found bank records showing she had been in Tennessee during the time of the crimes, according to the GoFundMe. Fargo police say on December 12, the State’s Attorney’s Office informed the Fargo detective that the defense had produced “potential exculpatory evidence.”

On December 23, the Fargo detective, the state’s attorney and the judge “mutually agreed to dismiss the charges without prejudice to allow for further investigation,” according to Fargo police. Lipps was released from custody on Christmas Eve.

For Lipps, her months of incarceration were devastating.

“The trauma, loss of liberty, and reputational damage cannot be easily fixed,” Lipps’ lawyers told CNN in an email. Her lawyers said Lipps was unavailable to speak for an interview.

Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five, had never been to North Dakota before her extradition, according to CNN affiliate WDAY.

And after her ordeal, she never plans to return to the state: “I’m just glad it’s over,” she told WDAY. “I’ll never go back to North Dakota.”

Her legal team says they’re investigating why Lipps was held in custody for so long when “it appears that exculpatory bank records were readily available.”

“We believe that Angela’s lengthy detention was unnecessary and should have been avoided with a proper investigation by law enforcement,” they said.

Her lawyers are exploring civil rights claims but have yet to file a lawsuit, they said.

Fargo police say they’ve found ‘a couple of errors’ in process

Zibolski, Fargo’s police chief, said authorities had identified a “couple of errors” in the investigative process that led to Lipps being identified as a potential suspect in the fraud cases.

At a Tuesday news conference, police said that the Fargo Police Department doesn’t have any AI-powered facial recognition tools of its own, but neighboring West Fargo does – and their system identified Lipps as a “potential suspect” based on the image on a fake ID used in a West Fargo fraud case.

“They forwarded that information to our detectives, who then assumed wrongly that they had also sent in the surveillance photos with that photo ID,” Zibolski said.

The chief said Fargo police will no longer be “sending or utilizing information” from West Fargo’s AI system because “it’s their own system – we don’t know how it’s run or how it’s overseen.”

Instead, Fargo police will work with state and federal authorities, including the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center, he said. Additionally, all facial recognition identifications will be submitted to the Investigations Division commander on a monthly basis, “so that we can keep a closer eye on this evolving technology,” he said.

Fargo police also erred, according to Zibolski, by not submitting surveillance photos associated with the fraud cases to the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center, which he said is certified and trained in facial recognition. Police “immediately began measures to address that,” and the center has since provided the center with other potential suspects based on the surveillance footage, Zibolski said.

He also addressed the months between Lipps’ extradition and her first interviews with Fargo authorities.

“In talking with Cass County and the State’s Attorney’s Office, there’s not an easy mechanism for them to notify us if someone arrested on our felony warrant is into custody,” he said. The department is considering improvements, including a daily review of the booking roster.

Asked if the department plans to apologize to Lipps, the chief said, “At this juncture, we still don’t know who’s involved and who’s not involved” in the fraud cases.

“We’re going to have to whittle through all of this kind of vast network of people and who’s involved,” he said.

Zibolski added police are still considering any disciplinary measures for officers involved in the investigation.

“What I can tell you, from what I know right now, is that the persons involved are also very upset by this, because they pride themselves on their thoroughness,” he said. “No one wants to see someone detained, arrested unnecessarily.”

The State’s Attorney’s Office is also “very interested” in attending training about facial recognition with the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center, “so that they have a better perspective also on the prosecutorial side,” the chief said.

Fargo police previously told CNN the case is still “open and active” and that “the charges may be refiled if additional investigation supports doing so.”

Lipps’ attorneys said that they appreciated the police department’s efforts toward correcting AI-related issues in the future but criticized what they characterized as a lack of “basic investigative efforts” before issuing Lipps a warrant.

“Officers knew that Angela was a Tennessee resident, and we have seen no investigation by officers to determine whether she traveled to or was in North Dakota at the time of the bank thefts,” they said in a news release after the Tuesday news conference. “Instead, an officer used AI facial recognition as a shortcut for basic investigation, resulting in an innocent woman being detained and transported halfway across the country to answer for charges that she had nothing to do with.”

AI in policing has drawn scrutiny

It’s not the first time that the use of AI in policing has attracted scrutiny.

Last year, armed police handcuffed and searched a Baltimore County high school student after an AI-driven security system flagged the teen’s empty bag of Doritos as a possible firearm.

The incident sparked criticism of the school’s safety protocols and calls for accountability.

Ian Adams, an assistant professor in the department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina, told CNN that police are currently rapidly adopting new technologies, including AI – with little evidence for their efficacy.

“We’re doing it so quickly that all agencies really have to rely on is vendor promises,” he said.

He added that most mistakes involving AI in policing involve human error, too.

“The overwhelming amount of the time, it’s not just a technology problem, it’s a technology and people problem,” Adams said. “We get nightmare scenarios when we don’t have people doing what they’re supposed to do, with technology that they’re using inappropriately.”

Because AI tools are so powerful, “it’s very easy to get lulled into a sense of complacency,” he said.

But “your detectives need to be really, really careful to make sure that they’re putting their human eyes on these algorithmic results.”

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CNN’s Diego Mendoza contributed to this report.