Kamala Harris Accused of Plagiarizing Parts of 2009 Criminal Reform Book

Kamala Harris Accused of Plagiarizing Parts of 2009 Criminal Reform Book

Yikes.

Christopher Rufo revealed a famous “plagiarism hunter” discovered numerous instances of plagiarism in Harris’s 2009 book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.

One instance comes from Wikipedia:

Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:

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.

There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:

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.

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.

In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:

The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.

To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.

The reactions have been priceless.

The New York Times wrote about the accusations but titled the piece “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book.”

The publication admits Harris plagiarized the work, but it’s not “serious” plagiarism:

The five passages that Mr. Rufo cited appeared to have been taken partly from other published work without quotation marks.

Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.

“This amount of plagiarism amounts to an error and not an intent to defraud,” he said, adding that Mr. Rufo had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to “make a big deal of it.”

Seriously, the article should be in the editorial section of the paper. The author spent more time talking down to Rufo because he dared to find plagiarism in books and documents by prominent people.

Plagiarism is serious.

When I went to school and when I taught, I learned plagiarism is plagiarism. We didn’t have levels of plagiarism. If you forgot to quote and cite anything, you plagiarized. You credited everything you got from anywhere else.

If it did not come from you, then you cite it and use quotes. It’s that simple.

Facts are also racist:

Mr. Rufo said that while he and his colleagues had examined mostly published work by white academics, plagiarism had shown up almost always among papers written by Black scholars, particularly Black women who work in diversity and inclusion.

“We can speculate as to why,” Mr. Rufo said, but he suggested that academic studies that lead to careers in diversity, equity and inclusion were not as rigorous as some others.

Some academics, however, have characterized the campaign as racist.

Don’t plagiarize. It’s that simple. I always told my students, “When in doubt, CITE. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

I think Republican VP candidate Sen. JD Vance had the best comeback:

Hi, I'm JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia. https://t.co/tkZvK8LrI3

— JD Vance (@JDVance) October 14, 2024

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