David Clarke, Controversial Milwaukee Sheriff, Plagiarized Thesis: Report

MILWAUKEE, WI – Controversial Milwaukee County David Clarke, who is linked to far-right conspiracy theorist groups and said last week that he is taking an undersecretary job with the Department of Homeland Security, plagiarized parts of his master’s thesis on homeland security, CNN reported.

The CNN KFile report said Clarke failed at least 47 times to properly attribute statements in his 2013 thesis, “Making U.S. Security and Privacy Rights Compatible.” He wrote the thesis for a master’s degree in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Milwaukee Patch, or click here to find your local Wisconsin Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

Clarke denounced the report on Twitter.

He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in an email that “only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism.”

Guidelines on plagiarism on the Naval Postgraduate School’s website require that if a passage is quoted verbatim, as the report maintains Clarke did, “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.”

Plagiarism is defined in the school’s honor code 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).”

Read Clarke’s thesis here. The Naval Post Graduate school removed the thesis from its website Saturday, putting in its place a note that stated: “This item was removed from view at the discretion of the Naval Postgraduate School.”

The Department of Homeland Security has not confirmed Clarke's appointment as assistant secretary for its Office of Partnership and Engagement. The individual in the position works as a liaison with state, local and tribal law enforcement and governments.

Phil McNamara, who currently served in the position, complained on Twitter that he is being replaced by someone who “wants to strangle Democrats.”

If Clarke is appointed, he will bring to the office a legacy of a string of federal lawsuits, mainly over inmate treatment. Four people have died in the Milwaukee County Jail he oversees, including one inmate who died of dehydration after going a week without water.

A rising star among law-and-order conservatives and known for his fiery rhetoric, Clarke once claimed that Black Lives Matter activists were forming an alliance with overseas terrorists to destroy America.

Clarke has called Trump protesters “anarchists” who “must be quelled.” He’s also a member of an anti-government extremist group, Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the organization that keeps track of hate groups. He once told the group that “government is the common enemy.”

Clarke was widely criticized in January after he ordered a man held at General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee for shaking his head at him during a flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Milwaukee. The four-term sheriff interpreted the head shaking as menacing and ordered his deputies to detain the man when the flight landed. The passenger filed a formal complaint, and Clarke fired back on the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page, calling the complainant a “snowflake” in a meme that stated: “Cheer up, Snowflake. If Sheriff Clarke were to really harass you, you wouldn’t be around to whine about it.”

Clarke has not only survived the criticism but seems to invite and relish it, if only to bolster his status as an authentic American hero among conservatives. He is a regular on Fox News and has the backing of the powerful National Rifle Association, whose members cheered Clarke’s suggestion in a keynote address to add an assault rifle to the national seal.

Clarke had briefly been mentioned as a wild-card candidate to replace fired FBI director James Comey.
The former homicide detective was appointed Milwaukee County sheriff in 2002. He won election four times on the Democratic ticket. The office is up for re-election in November 2018, and Clarke has said he informed Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker of his intent to accept to Homeland Security position and offered to help hand-pick his successor.

Susan Walsh/AP Photo