Fargo police sued for $10m over false arrest from AI facial recognition

Lipps jailed six months before bank records proved she was in Tennessee

Angela Lipps, 50, was arrested at gunpoint by U.S. marshals at her home in north-central Tennessee in July 2025 while babysitting her neighbor’s four children, according to the federal complaint. The mother of three and grandmother of five was booked into a county jail, where she remained for almost four months without bail while awaiting extradition to North Dakota. She had never been on a plane before authorities flew her to Fargo at the end of October 2025; she was held in North Dakota for about two more months.

Lipps was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft. The charges were ultimately dropped, and she was released “into the freezing cold … on Christmas Eve with no way to get home” after her lawyer, Jay Greenwood, provided bank records proving that she was in Tennessee at the time the fraud occurred in Fargo, the complaint says.

The complaint’s account of how Lipps came to be identified centers on AI facial recognition software. According to the lawsuit, an investigator used the software to identify bank-fraud suspects; the software returned Lipps’s social-media photo as a potential lead, which was then provided to Detective Heck. The image fed into the system, the complaint says, came from a fake ID used by a female suspect captured in surveillance video. Lipps did not resemble the female suspect, the complaint alleges, and had never been to North Dakota.

Heck “falsely suggested that facial recognition systems had identified Lipps and did not conduct further investigation or find sufficient probable cause — but requested an arrest warrant anyway,” the complaint alleges. Lipps’s lawsuit alleges that she was unlawfully arrested and imprisoned, and maliciously prosecuted.

The complaint describes the conditions Lipps experienced in custody. “She struggled with the fear of not knowing when she would be released or whether she would end up wrongly convicted and imprisoned for years,” the lawsuit states. “She missed family birthdays. She spent her own birthday incarcerated, separated from her family. She missed holidays with her loved ones, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. While in custody, she was denied basic care, such as her medications and her dentures.”

After her release, Lipps learned she had lost her residence, her car, and her personal property, the complaint says. The experience has left her with “lasting hardships and trauma that might be managed but never erased,” according to the lawsuit.

The “Fargo police department (FPD) and its agents have refused to accept responsibility or apologize to Lipps despite multiple requests for them to do so,” the complaint says, adding that the lawsuit seeks “to repair what has been broken” and “seeks accountability” from the department.

The complaint alleges the Fargo Police Department lacked adequate policy, training, and supervision over officers’ use of facial recognition technology. “They knew that AI facial recognition technology should not be used as the sole basis to extradite and charge a person,” the lawsuit alleges. “Yet they ignored those issues and gave no care to the harm it would do to innocent people like Lipps.”

Lipps’s other attorney, Eric Rice, told Tennessee television station WKRN that the $10 million his client is seeking is “obviously … a significant number, but it reflects the specific harm that happened to Angela.” “Can you imagine being taken away at gunpoint, held in detention, taken from your family?” Rice said.

A Fargo government spokesperson said the city does not comment on pending litigation. The lawsuit names the city of Fargo and Detective Heck as defendants.

Lipps said in the complaint that she hopes her case prompts officers to use greater care as facial recognition becomes more widespread. “As AI facial recognition technology becomes more accessible and widespread, Lipps hopes that her case will cause officers to use appropriate care and consider the harm their actions can have on those who are wrongly accused,” the complaint states.