On July 14, 2025, a U.S. Marshals fugitive task force arrested Angela Lipps of Elizabethton, Tennessee, on North Dakota bank-fraud charges after West Fargo police ran a photo taken from a fake ID through their own facial recognition system, one Fargo police leadership did not know about, and Fargo detectives never ran the case's surveillance photos through the state's certified hub before the arrest. She spent 163 days in jail before the charges were dismissed, the Fargo police chief publicly admitted the department's errors in March 2026, and Lipps filed a $10 million federal lawsuit in September 2026.
West Fargo Police Department detectives investigating a bank-fraud case ran facial recognition against a photograph taken from the suspect's fake identification, using an AI-powered facial recognition system the department had purchased on its own, one Fargo Police Department leadership was unaware of.
Why it matters
Lipps spent 163 days in jail, from her July 14, 2025 arrest to the December 24, 2025 dismissal of all eight felony charges, before being released that night, according to the lawsuit, with four cents and no winter coat in near-10-degree weather.
AI / automation’s role
The facial recognition system did not identify Lipps with certainty; it returned a probabilistic likeness to a photograph of a fake identification card - an investigative lead, not a positive identification.
On February 2, 2023, Detroit police arrested Porcha Woodruff, 32 and eight months pregnant, at her home as she was getting her children ready for school, charging her with robbery and carjacking.
On February 2, 2023, Detroit police arrested Porcha Woodruff, 32 and eight months pregnant, at her home as she was getting her children ready for school, charging her with robbery and carjacking.
Why it matters
An eight-months-pregnant woman was jailed for roughly eleven hours, experienced contractions and dehydration in custody, was charged with two felonies, and had to post a $100,000 bond before the case collapsed a month later.
AI / automation’s role
The facial recognition algorithm produced an investigative lead that was treated as if it were probable cause.
Clearview AI quietly assembled a facial-recognition database of more than 3 billion images by scraping photos from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, LinkedIn, Twitter and the wider web, all without the consent of the people pictured.
Clearview AI quietly assembled a facial-recognition database of more than 3 billion images by scraping photos from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, LinkedIn, Twitter and the wider web, all without the consent of the people pictured.
Why it matters
Clearview's complete customer list was exfiltrated, exposing which police forces and companies were secretly using face surveillance.
AI / automation’s role
The AI was a face-matching engine trained and operated on a dataset whose entire legal and ethical basis was never validated by anyone with the authority to say no.
In January 2020, Detroit police arrested Robert Williams outside his home in Farmington Hills, in front of his wife and two young daughters, and held him for roughly 30 hours in a crowded cell.
In January 2020, Detroit police arrested Robert Williams outside his home in Farmington Hills, in front of his wife and two young daughters, and held him for roughly 30 hours in a crowded cell.
Why it matters
An innocent man was arrested in front of his children, fingerprinted, photographed, DNA-swabbed, and jailed for about 30 hours over a crime he had nothing to do with.
AI / automation’s role
The face recognition system did exactly one thing: it returned a ranked list of candidate faces from a grainy, partial image and surfaced Williams as a probable match.
In July 2018 the ACLU ran every sitting member of the U.S.
Why it matters
No one was wrongly arrested in the ACLU test itself, but the demonstration showed that the production system police were already buying would falsely tag innocent people as criminals at a measurable, racially skewed rate.
AI / automation’s role
Rekognition operated as a fully automated identity-matching system with no human verification gate between the algorithm's output and the this-person-was-arrested verdict.
Courts across the United States adopted COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), an AI system that predicts recidivism risk to guide sentencing and bail decisions.
Courts across the United States adopted COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), an AI system that predicts recidivism risk to guide sentencing and bail decisions.
Why it matters
Thousands of defendants received harsher sentences based on a biased algorithm.
