It has recently been reported that Vice President Kamala Harris may have engaged in a dubious act of copying a few sections in her 2009 crime book. An expert on plagiarism heaved a sigh of indifference and dismissed the purported lapses as minimal. A conservative truth-seeker made claims on Monday outlining that her book, titled ‘Smart on Crime,’ contained reused content from commonly accessed locations, such as Wikipedia and popular journalistic pieces.
Of the approximately 65,000-word book spread across 200 pages, it turns out about 500 words have aroused skepticism. Harris wrote this book in collaboration with a co-author during her tenure as the district attorney in San Francisco. Delving into the alleged copied segments, it was found that they didn’t involve the pilfering of intellectual property, a particularly odious form of plagiarism. Instead, they consisted of regurgitated descriptions of programs or statistics.
The suspiciously borrowed content seems to have been inconspicuously slotted into the work, without the decency of enclosing them in quotation marks. A consultant specializing in plagiarism seemed to shrug-off the accusations, stating that this was a minor hiccup, given the scale of the document. He further defended Harris indirectly by stating that the magnitude of detected copying could simply result from an error rather than a deliberate attempt to deceive.
Fanning the controversy, he stated that the accuser may have exaggerated the seriousness of this issue. According to him, the accuser tried to magnify some minor citation goof-ups in a substantial document to generate a scandal. Perhaps as expected, the campaign vociferously denied these allegations, dismissing them as merely a desperate attempt by conservatives to pull down Harris’s growing popularity.
Supporters of Harris were quick to point out that the book has been publicly available for 15 years and Harris had in fact referenced sources and statistics, providing ample footnotes and endnotes. The person behind these accusations is associated with a collective of politically right-leaning authors and activists that have made it their mission to uncover instances of plagiarism in academia over the previous year.
The probe into Harris’s work is indicative of their changing focus from purely academic circles to government and political personalities. The whistleblower, in an attempt to perhaps underscore the intensity of his work, mentioned that his team has probed the professional output of roughly 300 authors. Even the master’s thesis of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the democratic partner of Harris, was scrutinized, but no evidence of copying was found.
Interestingly, the whistleblower, self-proclaimed as the one leading the fight against leftist ideology, divulged that he did not carry out similar plagiarism checks on works authored by former President Donald J. Trump or his Republican ally, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.
The reason? Supposedly, their works wouldn’t corroborate the group’s working hypothesis. One contentious point raised by the critic was that they found examples of plagiarism more frequently among the work of Black scholars, particularly Black females active in the field of diversity and inclusion, which was a curious observation. However, certain academics have painted this mission as racially discriminatory.
In the accusations about Harris’s book, he pointed out sentences that seemed to be borrowed from different sources, discussing crime statistics and contributory conditions. A chapter of Harris’s book dealing with crime prevention methods in High Point, N.C. does seem to include a paragraph strikingly similar to one from a public news release.
However, it’s worth mulling over whether lifting a set of statistics and a strategy that was employed can be as severe as it’s being made out to be. This paragraph delves into the effectiveness of crime interdiction in High Point, emphasizing a considerable reduction in crime rates following a strategic move.
‘Smart on Crime’ primarily concentrates on Harris’s policing responsibilities and was produced around the time she entered the race for California attorney general. This book was seen as an attempt to pitch herself to national audiences. More recently, however, the focus has shifted to probing Harris’s stance on crime.
Another section which discusses the nexus between high school dropout rates and crime, cites a 2008 report by the Education Research Center for some statistics. However, the description of the report closely mirrors a passage perhaps originally published by The Associated Press and republished in another news outlet. Astonishingly, neither The A.P. nor the other outlet finds mention in the book. Does this suggest a tendency to sidestep due credit?