Thanks to Adam Reilly for directing us to an article from a few months back that points out just how silly it is for Kerry Healey to proclaim herself some sort of crime expert.
How do we know Kerry Healey is a criminal-justice expert? Because she says so.
By: DAVID S. BERNSTEIN
3/8/2006 7:16:39 PM
As she sets her sights on promotion, Kerry Healey has resurrected and even expanded her grandiose claims to criminal-justice expertise originally made during her 2002 campaign for lieutenant governor. Healeys campaign Web site says that she enjoyed a distinguished career as a law and public safety consultant. In a press release issued this week, she claims to be a criminologist and former consultant to the US Department of Justice in the 1990s who extensively researched domestic and gang-related violence. In her campaign-announcement speech last month she said, I worked for the US Department of Justice researching crime. The states official Web site also says that she has authored four books on criminal justice. [It appears that the absurd “four books” claim has been removed — BMG, among others, debunked it months ago. –ed.]
Those books are actually co-authored white papers of secondary research (pulling together previous work), written during her roughly 10-year stint as a part-time consultant for Cambridge-based Abt Associates, mostly under an Abt contract with a branch of the Justice Department. She was never a DoJ employee or consultant. She has no education or experience that qualifies her as a criminologist. And by no definition can her career be called distinguished her reports are seldom cited, and she was never invited as a speaker or panelist in the field prior to becoming lieutenant governor. Even Abt executives have offered little praise for Healey.
Padding a résumé is not a disqualifying sin in politics. What matters is whether Healey, handed control of crime issues by a thoroughly disinterested governor, parlayed her self-proclaimed expertise into a public-safety agenda that has served the Commonwealth.
The results are mixed, at best. While she has implemented a few changes to the states badly broken criminal-justice system, she has mostly wasted her efforts scoring easy political points and fighting unnecessary battles. Meanwhile, on her watch, violent crime has swamped cities from Fall River to Springfield. No wonder she still talks about her work in the 1990s, and has little to say about what shes done over the past three years.
Read the rest. If crime is going to be a defining issue in this campaign, then by all means, let’s talk about who has the more impressive record doing something about real crime in the real world.
the next debate features these crime issues prominently. Let’s talk about Kerry Healey’s record, let’s talk about Deval Patrick. I’m convined it will be the end of her candidacy and Deval will own voters who are concerned about crime (as well as he should; he’s the expert here, not Kerry Healey).
I scanned the Abt web site a couple of days ago for “Healey” and got 2 hits identfying her as a former employee but no hits for her “research” or publications.
I downloaded one of her ahem books: Case Management in the Criminal Justice System from the DoJ at http://www.ojp.usdoj…
A 12-page secondary research paper, as high quality as has been mentioned here repeatedly. Fascinating too how little of her criminolgiist expertise shows up in her 50 ways.
has ceded the issue of crime to Healey on the assumption that because she claims to be a criminologist she knows what she’s taking about. Criminal justice policy is a complex area of study and an even more incomprehensible area of government and legislation. So the media should be forgiven if they took a look and said “no thanks, we ain’t goin’ there.” If all they did was print what was said by the campaigns then fine, at least it’s an even playing field.
But of course they didn’t do this. They decided to offer analysis to these very complex issues with scant attention to the facts, research or even the law and proposed legislation. In doing this, they have presented not even token questions when Healey spouts off about how much she knows about crime. But for Patrick, all of a sudden these Scoopies know everything there is (on Google) about CORI or the Florida appellate courts or the criteria for parole consideration. Luckily they have been able to call on the Healey campaign to fill in the gaps.
The media’s active reliance on Healey’s alleged expertise has made issues out of instances that have very little relevance to residents of the Commonwealth. The actual crime issues that touch our lives every day have received nary a whimper from the 4th Estate.