Sheriff David Clarke, the Wisconsin sheriff who has come under fire for controversial prison practices and statements, allegedly plagiarized his master’s thesis in 2013. According to CNN’s investigative reporting team KFile, Clarke failed to properly attribute his sources 47 times throughout the paper that he wrote while working on his postgraduate degree at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His degree is in security studies, and while under review his paper has been removed from the school’s website.
Based on CNN’s report, Clarke cited his sources in the paper but did not actually delineate his references from his own words and ideas with quotation marks, which amounts to plagiarism under the school’s guidelines. The situation bears a resemblance to the plagiarism allegations against Monica Crowley, whose respective review is still ongoing. Among the sources which Clarke plagiarized from are multiple ACLU reports, the 9/11 Commission Report, the Pew Research Center, a Washington Post report, and many other sources. The paper has been removed from the Naval Postgraduate School’s website as per standard procedure.
On Twitter, KFile reporter Andrew Kaczynski laid out some of the lifted passages in Clarke’s paper.
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/866101780018548737
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/866101481635819524
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/866100162007093249
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/866099750076112896
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/866099549902962688
Recent protests have aimed to draw attention to Clarke’s allegedly unsettling incarceration practices, and between that and his comments at the Republican National Convention, this is the latest in a string of controversial stories about the Sheriff.
(Via CNN)