Opinion ID: 787454
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Alpert's Testimony

Text: 51 Finally, we evaluate the Officers' claim that the district court erred in permitting Alpert's expert testimony. The Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993), established the standard for admissibility of scientific expert testimony under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. The requirement that any and all scientific testimony or evidence admitted [be] not only relevant, but reliable, Id. at 589, 113 S.Ct. 2786, entails a preliminary assessment of whether the reasoning or methodology underlying the testimony is scientifically valid and of whether that reasoning or methodology properly can be applied to the facts in issue. Id. at 592-93, 113 S.Ct. 2786. This test has also been applied to non-scientific expert testimony, such as Alpert's. Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137, 149, 119 S.Ct. 1167, 143 L.Ed.2d 238 (1999). 52 The Officers argue that Alpert did not present any specialized knowledge that was reliable or of any assistance to the jury. The Officers rely principally on Berry v. City of Detroit, 25 F.3d 1342 (6th Cir.1994), in which we held that the plaintiff's expert, a so-called specialist in the field of police policies and practices was not qualified to speak about the city government's policy of disciplining officers for alleged uses of excessive force. Id. at 1348-54. In Berry, we stated that there is no such `field' as `police policies and practices,' mainly because we believed that the concept of such a field as presented by that expert was far too broad. Id. at 1352. We analogized to the legal profession, stating that labeling the individual in Berry as an expert when he did not demonstrate that he had experience in any particular aspect of studying the police was like declaring an attorney an expert in the `law.' Id. However, by reasoning that a divorce lawyer was no more an expert on patent law than anyone else, we implicitly recognized that individuals with specialized knowledge could most certainly serve as experts, i.e., patent lawyers can serve as experts in patent law. We did not hold that an individual cannot ever testify as an expert about some aspect of police affairs. Rather, the holding in Berry reasoned that unqualified individuals could not broadly testify about an area in which they possessed no specialized knowledge. While police practices in the broadest sense of the phrase may not be a field, surely criminology is. 53 Indeed, the chief reason for our decision in Berry was that the expert's credentials demonstrated that he had no specific expertise about police activities. He had limited experience, given that he was appointed as a deputy sheriff, a post that required almost no qualifications, and he had been fired twice from the position. Furthermore, he lacked any formal training or experience on the subject of criminology or police actions. Compounding the problem was his ungrounded and methodologically flawed testimony regarding what effect the City of Detroit's procedural shortcomings would have upon the future conduct of 5,000 police officers who would be confronted with a diverse and unpredictable array of situations in which force would be used. See Dickerson, 101 F.3d at 1163-64 (relying on the affidavit of a criminology professor, which opined that an officer used excessive force, in deciding that material fact issues remained regarding qualified immunity); Estate of Boncher v. Brown County, 272 F.3d 484, 486 (7th Cir.2001) (recognizing implicitly the field of criminology by labeling the expert a reputable criminologist, but excluding expert's affidavit as useless because it was too general). 54 By contrast, the Plaintiffs' expert, Alpert, testified about a discrete aspect of police practices, namely use of excessive force, based upon his particularized knowledge about the area. In contrast to the expert in Berry, Alpert's credentials are much more extensive and substantial. Alpert has a PhD in sociology from Washington State University, is employed by the University of South Carolina's Department of Criminology, teaches classes on police procedures and practices, has been involved with federal research funded by the Department of Justice that evaluates the use of force by officers, trains officers in the use of force, works with police departments to create use-of-force policies, has testified before Congress and state legislatures about police policies, and has authored forty to fifty articles on the subject of police procedures, many of which have appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Alpert Test., Transcript Vol III at 428-32 (Attached to Motion to Take Judicial Notice). Unlike the expert in Berry, Alpert testified about much more specific issues: the continuum of force employed by officers generally, the specific training the Officers received, and Alpert's opinion that if the witnesses' testimony is credited, the Officers' actions violated nationally recognized police standards governing excessive force. The critical difference between testifying about the impact of police policies upon a large group of officers and testifying about the proper actions of individual officers in one discrete situation highlights the inapplicability of Berry. Courts have permitted experts to testify about discrete police-practice issues when those experts are properly credentialed and their testimony assists the trier of fact. See Dickerson, 101 F.3d at 1163-64; Kladis v. Brezek, 823 F.2d 1014, 1019 (7th Cir.1987). Because Alpert had considerable experience in the field of criminology and because he was testifying concerning a discrete area of police practices about which he had specialized knowledge, we hold that the district court did not abuse its considerable discretion in admitting Alpert's testimony.