Vice President Kamala Harris is under investigation for plagiarizing her book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer (2009). It was co-written with Joan O’C Hamilton, who served as Harris’ deputy district attorney in San Francisco, and it is alleged that many of the passages were taken straight from elsewhere, unattributed.
It was Chris Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who first exposed Harris’ book as having a number of instances where complete sentences and phrases were copied from others. One of these researchers, the Austrian professor Stefan Weber, has discovered 26 potential scribal errors in the book: 24 by others, three by himself, from a previous co-authored work.
Fox News Digital disputed some of those assertions independently, saying that lines in ‘Smart on Crime’ almost matched passages from an NBC News report from 2008, a release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and a story from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). Even when cited in footnotes, the absence of quotes cast doubt on the citation.
One such press release from 2007 by John Jay College about crime reduction in High Point, North Carolina, for instance, quotes from a scene in Harris’ book almost word-for-word, without even an insertion of quotation marks to signal direct copying.
Other readings revealed the same problems, using extracts from a BJA 2000 report on the socio-economic status of West Palm Beach in Florida. Harris and her co-author apparently reproduced this content with some minor edits but, yet again, without quotation marks, threatening to be untrustworthy sources for the book.
Harris’ campaign and the White House refused to comment on these charges. The controversy comes less than a month out from the election, and Harris and the Republican nominee Donald Trump are locked in a very competitive race, as most polls predict.
