The US Vice President and the Democratic Party Presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, finds herself being accused of plagiarism in her book “Smart on Crime.”
Kamala Harris is often acclaimed for her inimitable allegorical style and can move smoothly between accents. Her oratory is often dotted with punch lines that border on pretentiousness and sometimes difficult-to-digest lingo. To her supporters, her figurative flourishes are an epitome of compassion and optimism, while her critics accuse her of relying heavily on clichés and rehashing. However, she is also accused of plagiarism in her rhetoric.
When Kamala Harris began her political journey and the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she co-authored with Joan O’C Hamilton a small volume entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book went on in a big way to establish her credentials as an expert on criminal justice issues.
Kamala Harris’s Smart on Crime Under Fire After Plagiarism Allegations
In a report by Conservative Activist Christopher Rufo, the Democratic presidential nominee is accused of plagiarizing five short passages from her 2009 book on crime. However, a plagiarism expert said the lapses were not serious.
Christopher Rufo revealed that Vice President Kamala Harris had plagiarized from widely available sites, which included Wikipedia and news reports, for her 2009 book Smart on Crime.
The Smart on Crime book is 65,000 words and is a 200-page book, with the plagiarized contents amounting to 500 words.
New York Times Review Clears Plagiarism Charges
However, the New York Times, after reviewing the book, stated that the passages in question did not take ideas or thoughts from another writer and are not considered a serious form of plagiarism. The book only reproduced descriptions of programs or statistical information that is freely available.
Another plagiarism expert and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey, in response to Mr. Rufo’s claims, stated that the errors are trivial considering the size of the document. He also stated that Mr. Rufo has magnified the minor citation mistakes to make it a big deal.
However, there is no dearth of critics who accuse the US Vice President of vicious plagiarism. One such critic is Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has humbled quite a few politicians in the German-speaking world. The instances of plagiarism that Weber has highlighted include the section dealing with graduation rates; Kamala Harris has lifted verbatim from an uncited NBC News report. Kamala only changed the font to italics. The passage read,
“In Detroit’s public schools, only 25% of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5% graduated in Indianapolis public schools, and 34% received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District.
Overall, about 70% of 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.”
Stefan Weber highlights another instance where Harris, without citation, reproduced broad sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release.
The plagiarism claims were quickly lapped up by political opponents, with Senator J.D. Vance stating, “Lmao, Kamala didn’t even write her book!”
Donald Trump Jr. also jumped into the fray and wrote, “Yikes! More evidence that Kamala Harris is a fraud!!!”
Also Read: UFO Mother Ships Spotted Above US Military Bases, Deploying Small Drones
