Angela Lipps filed a federal lawsuit Sept. 15 by 10 million dollars against the city of Fargo (North Dakota) and detective Lucas Heck, member of the Fargo Police Department. The 50-year-old woman, grandmother of five grandchildren, was arrested in July 2025 in Tennessee while she was looking after her neighbor’s children. The accusation: multiple thefts against banks in the Fargo area, crimes to which she was completely unrelated.
The mechanism that triggered the case is as simple as it is worrying. A West Fargo Police Department investigator used Clearview AI to compare the photo on a fake ID used by the real suspect to public databases and social media. The system returned Lipps’ profile photo as a possible match. Since then, instead of launching a verification investigation, Heck has requested an arrest warrant without going into further detail, according to what is claimed in the charging document.
The identification problems were evident even to the naked eye: Lipps’ build, features and tattoos did not match the person captured by the banks’ surveillance cameras. Lipps, moreover, had never set foot in North Dakota in his entire life.
Six months of detention, Christmas in the cell
After the arrest, Lipps was stuck in a detention center in Tennessee for several monthsthe time necessary to resolve some probation violation charges relating to previous and entirely separate events. Then transferred to Cass County (North Dakota), she found herself facing a bail of $100,000 which he was unable to pay. She got out on Christmas Eve 2025, only after her attorney submitted bank statements that unequivocally placed the woman in Tennessee during the thefts.
During the months of detention Lipps said he suffered traumatic conditionsthat it was difficult for her to receive the drugs she needed and that she was even denied dental prostheses. She missed her birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas away from her family. Once free, she discovered that she had also lost her residence, her car and most of her personal possessions.
Fargo’s then-police chief, Dave Zibolski, admitted in March that he had “identified a couple of errors” in the investigation. He explained that the Fargo detectives had mistakenly assumed that the AI match also involved photos from the surveillance cameras of the banks under their jurisdiction, when in reality it only referred to the photo on the fake document. An assumption that “we shouldn’t have made,” he acknowledged. The department, without its own facial recognition system, then use of West Fargo technology prohibited in their investigations.
The indictment points the finger not only at a single investigative error, but at a structural deficiency: the Fargo Police Department knew that the unsupervised use of facial recognition in investigations could lead to illegitimate detentions, yet it had not set up adequate control protocols. It is not certain that the lawsuit will change the procedures of other departments in the country, but the price that Lipps could extract from the city of Fargo risks becoming a precedent that is difficult to ignore for anyone considering relying on these tools without the necessary guarantees.
