Controversial Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke -- who was nominated last week for a post in President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) -- plagiarized sections of his masters thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
CNN's KFile reported Saturday evening that Clarke's thesis on U.S. security fails to give proper attribution its sources a whopping 47 times.
Rather than use quote marks to indicate where he was pulling from other sources, wrote Andrew Kaczynski, Christopher Massie and Nathan McDermott, Clarke cut and pasted passages from other works verbatim -- a direct violation of the Naval Postgraduate School's guidelines on academic integrity.
"If a passage is quoted verbatim, it must be set off with quotation marks (or, if it is a longer passage, presented as indented text), and followed by a properly formulated citation. The length of the phrase does not matter. If someone else's words are sufficiently significant to be worth quoting, then accurate quotation followed by a correct citation is essential, even if only a few words are involved," the guidelines state.
CNN said, "The school's honor code defines plagiarism as 'submitting material that in part or whole is not one's own work without proper attribution. Plagiarism is further defined as the use, without giving reasonable and appropriate credit to or acknowledging the author or source, of another person's original work, whether such work is made up of code, formulas, ideas, language, research, strategies, writing or other form(s).'"
Works that Clarke pulled passages from included: "a 2002 ACLU report about 'The Government's Demand for New and Unnecessary Powers After September 11,' a 2003 ACLU report critical of the FBI's records-collection practices, a 2007 ACLU report on 'fusion centers,' and a 2011 ACLU report on the need to overhaul secrecy laws."
"Other sources Clarke lifted words from include: the 9/11 Commission Report, a 2011 article in the Homeland Security Affairs journal, the Pew Research Center, a 2012 report by the Constitution Project, a 2003 report by the US General Accounting Office, a 2011 Brennan Center report, a 2013 Washington Post article about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Comparative Homeland Security: Global Lessons, a textbook by Nadav Morag, and Safe Cities Project, a research paper published by the Manhattan Institute," CNN said, as well as passages from George W. Bush's memoir Decision Points.
When contacted by CNN, the Naval Postgraduate Institute said in a statement from Lt. Cdr. Clint Phillips that said, "Like all academic institutions, the Naval Postgraduate School takes the integrity of our students' work very seriously, perhaps even more than our peers given the unique nature of our mission and student body. Standard procedure to any formal accusation of plagiarism is to pull the student's thesis, and perform an investigation into the validity of the claims."
He continued, "The university's academic conduct code, and our procedures in checking for plagiarism at the time of thesis submission, and following graduation, can change from year to year. In this particular case, we would be unable to determine any violation until the full investigation is complete."
Clarke is wildly unpopular in Milwaukee. His powers as sheriff have been limited, but at the jail under his jurisdiction, two inmates and a newborn baby have died from neglect in recent years.
Clarke gave a completely unhinged interview to CNN's Don Lemon in 2016 in which he alleged that members of Black Lives Matter are terrorists who are trying to bring down the U.S. from within.
In the past, Clarke has accused BLM of inciting the murders of police officers, while also blaming riots in his home city of Milwaukee on the “questionable lifestyle choices” of the city's black residents.
