Kamala Harris Accused of Multiple Incidents of Plagiarism in 2009 Book

Vice President Kamala Harris is being accused of plagiarizing several portions of her 2009 book “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer,” nearly four decades after President Biden’s first bid for the White House was sunk by his own plagiarism scandal. The allegations surfaced after Stefan Weber, who has made a name for himself by bringing to light incidents of plagiarism committed by German politicians, examined “Smart on Crime,” which was co-written by Ms. Harris and Joan O’C. Hamilton. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo looked into the allegations and found “more than a dozen” offenses.Mr. Rufo notes some examples are “minor transgressions — reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing.” However, other portions of the book are ripped word-for-word from different sources without proper attribution. The Sun also reviewed the passages and found language identical to other materials without attribution.One passage of “Smart on Crime” focuses on the graduation rates of public schools in large cities. The passage in the book reads, “In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.”While the structure of the paragraph is inverted, several portions of it mirrored the language in a 2008 report from the Associated Press.“The report, issued by America’s Promise Alliance, found that about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas,” the AP report reads. “Nationally, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a regular diploma and about 1.2 million students drop out annually.The section on Detroit’s public school system appears to have been copied nearly verbatim, “In Detroit’s public schools, 24.9 percent of the students graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis Public Schools and 34.1 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District.”Ms. Harris’ book references newspapers that are “full of stories about all the top students who can’t get into Ivy League schools despite high grade-point averages” and laments that the “less frequently covered” issue of high-school drop-out rates. Her book declines to provide attribution for the AP report about drop-out rates from which the section appears to have copied.In another example, Ms. Harris and her co-author appear to have copied directly from a press release issued by the John Jay School of Criminal Justice about a North Carolina police department’s strategy to crack down on a drug market.“High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide,” Ms. Harris’ book reads. “The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.”Except for spelling out the word “percent,” not abbreviating state names, and including “additional” at the end, that section is a word-for-word match of the John Jay press release. Mr. Rufo says Ms. Harris appears to have copied directly from Wikipedia in one passage, despite long standing concerns about the online encyclopedia’s accuracy. He also says the book “misstated a relevant detail” from Wikipedia. The Sun reached out to the Harris campaign for a comment, but did not hear back by publication time. When the New York Post contacted Ms. Hamilton about the plagiarism allegations, she responded, “Oh gosh. I haven’t seen anything. I’m afraid I can’t talk to you right now, though, I’m in the middle of something. Let me go try to figure that out.”Senator Vance mocked the vice president over the allegations, writing on X, “Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.”Mr. Biden had his 1987 presidential bid derailed by a plagiarism scandal after it came to light. The scandal started after Mr. Biden was forced to admit he copied gestures and phrases from the then-leader of Britain’s Labor Party, Neil Kinnock.Mr. Biden later admitted he also plagiarized from a law review article during his first year of law school, which he said was “a mistake.” Eleven days after the scandal erupted, he dropped out of the race.

Kamala Harris Accused of Multiple Incidents of Plagiarism in 2009 Book

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