Kamala Harris accused of multiple incidents of plagiarism in 2009 Book

Vice President Kamala Harris is being accused of plagiarizing parts 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 scuttled by his own plagiarism scandal.

The allegations came after Dr. Stefan Weber, who has made a name for himself by exposing incidents of plagiarism by German politicians, examined “Smart on Crime,” which was co-written by Ms. Harris and Joan O’C. Hamilton. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo investigated the allegations and found “more than a dozen” wrongdoing.

Mr. Rufo points out that some examples are “mild transgressions — playing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing.” However, other parts of the book are taken verbatim from different sources without proper attribution.

The Sun also reviewed the passages and found language identical to other unattributed material.

A passage from “Smart on Crime” focuses on public school graduation rates in big cities.

The passage from the book reads: “In Detroit Public Schools, only 25 percent of students who enrolled in the ninth grade graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated from Indianapolis Public Schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland City School District.Overall, about 70 percent of American students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out of school annually. Only about half of the students who attend public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.”

Although the structure of the paragraph is reversed, several parts of it mirrored language in a 2008 Associated Press report.

“The report, issued by America’s Promise Alliance, found that about half of the students served in public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas,” the AP report said. “Nationally, about 70 percent of American students graduate on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out each year.

The section on Detroit’s public school system appears to have been copied almost verbatim: “In Detroit’s public schools, 24.9 percent of students graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated from Indianapolis public schools and 34.1% received diplomas from the Cleveland Municipal School District.”

Ms. Harris’s book refers to newspapers that are “full of stories about all the top students who can’t get into Ivy League schools despite high GPAs” and laments that the topic is “covered less frequently ” of high school dropouts out of fees. His book does not want to provide attribution for the AP report on dropout rates from which he appears to have copied the section.

In another example, Ms. Harris and her co-author appear to have directly copied 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, on May 18, 2004. The drug market was immediately and permanently shut down, with a sustained reduction of 35 % of violent crimes. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. Virtually no public drug dealing remains in the city, and serious crime is down 20 percent citywide,” Ms. Harris’s book says. “Since then, the High Point Strategy has been implemented in Winston-Salem, and Raleigh, North Carolina; and in Rockford, Illinois. The US Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.”

Except for writing the word “percent,” not abbreviating the names of the states, and including “additional” at the end, this section is a word-for-word match to John Jay’s press release.

Mr. Ms. Harris appears to have copied directly from Wikipedia in one passage, Rufo says, despite long-standing concerns about the online encyclopedia’s accuracy. He also says the book “got a relevant detail wrong” from Wikipedia.

The Sun contacted the Harris campaign for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

When the New York Post contacted Ms. Hamilton about the plagiarism allegations, she responded: “Oh, my God. I haven’t seen anything. I’m afraid I can’t talk to you right now, but I’m in the middle of ‘something. Let me go try to find out.”

Senator Vance mocked the vice president over the allegations, writing to 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 began after Mr Biden was forced to admit that he copied gestures and phrases from the then leader of the British Labor Party, Neil Kinnock.

Mr. Biden later admitted that he also plagiarized a law review article during his first year of law school, which he said was “a mistake.” Eleven days after the scandal broke, he dropped out of the race.