Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem

The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime.

Kamala Harris has become famous, in part, for her unique rhetorical style. She switches freely between various accents and peppers her speeches with catchphrases: pondering falling “out of a coconut tree,” discussing “the significance of the passage of time,” and moving the nation toward “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

To her supporters, the vice president’s rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.

But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris’s rhetorical universe: plagiarism.

At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:

In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the 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.

There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:

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 a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:

The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.

To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.

While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences. Here is the passage in Harris’s book, with duplicated material from the BJA report noted in italics:

Take West Palm Beach, Florida. This residential neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown struggles with a high crime rate. 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 business had opened in the area, and few new houses had been built in recent years.

Finally, when attempting to write a description of a nonprofit group, Harris simply lifted promotional language from an Urban Institute report, and failed to cite her source. Here is the current vice president, with the lifted language in italics:

Participants meet six days a week for twelve hours a day and take part in an intensive schedule that involves classes, group learning, and group counseling designed to help them take a hard look at the violence in their lives. When the men are released after serving their sentences, they continue a six-month substance-abuse program or continue in the Post Release Education Program. The men are also required to participate in community restoration activities to begin to make amends for the impact of violence on the community; RSVP conducts workshops and discussions at high schools and other public events to increase awareness about violent crime.

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. They not only lifted material from sources without proper attribution, but in at least one case, relied on a low-quality source, which potentially undermined the accuracy of their conclusion.

Of course, Harris, like many other public figures, may have relied entirely on a ghostwriter to draft her book. But that is not exculpatory: Harris, at the end of the day, put her name on the cover.

On that point, one might recall the title of her book: Smart on Crime. There is nothing smart about plagiarism, which is the equivalent of an academic crime. The publisher, as well as the sitting vice president, should retract the plagiarized passages and issue a correction. There should be a single standard—and Kamala Harris is falling short.