Kamal Ghorui
A Tennessee woman spent months in jail after police used an AI facial recognition tool to link her to crimes in another state. According to a CNN report, the woman, identified as 50-year-old Angela Lipps, said she had never been to North Dakota, the state where the alleged crimes took place. As per the report, authorities in Fargo, North Dakota, have admitted there were mistakes in the case and said they are reviewing their procedures, though they have not issued a formal apology. The case highlights concerns about the use of facial recognition tech in investigations.
What exactly happened
According to the Fargo Police Department, Lipps was arrested in Tennessee on July 14 after a warrant had been issued in North Dakota weeks earlier. The warrant was related to multiple bank fraud incidents reported in and around Fargo. Police said the arrest was based on a facial recognition match, which later appeared to be incorrect. 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, CNN reports.Notably, Lipps was taken into custody by the police despite being more than 1,000 miles away from the location of the alleged crimes.Fargo police department told CNN that they use Clearview AI, a startup with a database of billions of photos scraped from the internet. 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.
Police admit errors, review process
Fargo police said there were “a few errors” in how the case was handled. In a press conference, Fargo Police Department Chief Dave Zibolski said his police department’s reliance on some of the information from a neighboring agency’s AI system is “part of the issue”. “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.
