Kamala Harris accused of plagiarizing in 2009 book about being 'smart on crime'
Vice President Harris is being accused of plagiarizing from several sources in her 2009 book on policing that was released while she was district attorney of San Francisco.
The book, "Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer," was co-authored with Joan O'C Hamilton.
The so-called "plagiarism hunter," Austrian professor Stefan Weber, found 27 times that Harris, the 2024 Democrat nominee for president, and her co-author allegedly committed some form of plagiarism.
He found that "24 fragments are plagiarism from other authors, [and] 3 fragments are self-plagiarism from a work written with a co-author."
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Manhattan Institute senior fellow and conservative activist Chris Rufo first reported on the allegation on Monday, pointing to multiple examples from Harris' book in which entire sentences and phrases were apparently lifted from other sources without the use of quotations, though in some cases a footnote cites the source.
"Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here. Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism," Rufo wrote.
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Fox News Digital independently verified that Harris' book features verbatim and near-verbatim reproductions from a 2008 NBC News report, a press release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a Wikipedia page and a report from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), among others.
A 2007 press release from John Jay reads:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18th, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35% 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% citywide.
The High Point strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, NC; in Providence, RI; and in Rockford, IL. The US Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten cities.
Harris' book includes the following:
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 another instance, a report published by BJA in 2000 says:
Although West Palm Beach is less than 1 mile from Palm Beach, one of the most affluent cities in the country, 41 percent of the neighborhood’s 5,360 residents live in poverty and the unemployment rate stands at 20 percent. The physical characteristics of the community are striking: deteriorated houses and businesses, vacant lots with discarded mattresses and piles of trash, and litter strewn throughout the streets, sidewalks, yards, and parks. No new businesses have opened in the area, and few new houses have been built in recent years.
And Harris and her co-author wrote:
Although West Palm Beach is less than one mile from Palm Beach, one of the most affluent cities in the country, more than a third of the town's residents live in poverty, and unemployment is high. The community is full of deteriorated houses and businesses, vacant lots with discarded mattresses and piles of trash, and litter strewn throughout the streets, sidewalks, yards, and parks. At the time the community considered adding a court, no new businesses had opened in the area, and few new houses had been built in recent years.
Harris is running against former President Trump, the Republican nominee. With the election less than a month away, many polls are showing the battle within the margin of error in critical swing states.
Harris' campaign and the White House did not provide comment to Fox News Digital in time for publication.