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Under the Daubert Standard, the trial court considers the following factors to determine whether the expert’s methodology is valid:

The Council advances understanding of the criminal justice policy choices facing the nation and builds consensus for solutions that enhance safety and justice for all.

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The Daubert Standard supplanted the Frye Standard, which focused primarily on the general acceptance of scientific evidence within a particular field. See Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923). While some state courts still adhere to the Frye Standard, the Daubert Standard is used in all federal courts.

To challenge expert testimony as inadmissible under the Daubert Standard, opposing counsel may bring a pretrial motion, including a motion in limine.  Usually, a motion attacking the admissibility of expert testimony will be brought after the close of discovery, with a hearing held prior to trial.

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Working Group chair Rick Rosenfeld, Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri St-Louis, described significant opportunities to improve the Crime Data Explorer, the FBI’s current public interface for its crime data. Working Group members discussed how researchers, policymakers, and the public have different crime data interests and need to be able to access NIBRS data in different ways. Rosenfeld also emphasized the need to make NIBRS data more timely.

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In Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael 526 U.S. 137 (1999), the Supreme Court ruled that the Daubert Standard may apply to non-scientific testimony, meaning "the testimony of engineers and other experts who are not scientists."  Along with Daubert, these cases are often referred to as the “Daubert Trilogy.” Federal Rule of Evidence 702 was modified based on these cases.

This report looks at the prevalence and concentration of shoplifting in two major cities—Los Angeles and Chicago—before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Subsequent U.S. Supreme Court cases have clarified the Daubert Standard. In General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136 (1997), the Supreme Court ruled that an appellate court may still review whether a trial court abused its discretion to admit or exclude expert testimony.

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Members also heard from the group’s federal liaisons, Alex Piquero, Director of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), and Deputy Assistant Director Brian Griffith, of the Law Enforcement and Technology Services Branch of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division. The two liaisons discussed the significant investments that have been made over the past two years to enhance data capacities, including several dozen new employees at BJS. Piquero and Griffith discussed efforts to accelerate NIBRS reporting and crime data publication, the need for standards, and the need to build robust partnerships with researchers and states in order to enhance the value of NIBRS.

We have accomplished a lot together in our first five years, but we are just getting started. Will you support the Council as we build bridges across ideological divides and craft consensus for solutions?

Examining data for the nation’s three largest cities through fall of 2024, this report finds that shoplifting levels remain higher than pre-pandemic rates. It also highlights two conflicting sources of federal data on the crime.

Representatives of small and large law enforcement departments and state criminal justice agencies provided a comprehensive overview of the transition to NIBRS from their perspectives. They described obstacles that continue to challenge many states and local law enforcement agencies and identified practices that are helping accelerate the transition. Among the points made and discussed were the following:

The “Daubert Standard” provides a systematic framework for a trial court judge to assess the reliability and relevance of expert witness testimony before it is presented to a jury. Established in the 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), this standard transformed the landscape of expert testimony by placing the responsibility on trial judges to act as "gatekeepers" of scientific evidence.

Military veterans have more than twice the risk of suicide death as non-veterans. This brief examines a federal program designed to identify veterans with the highest suicide risk in order to provide enhanced outreach and support. It finds that the prediction model had low accuracy for identifying veterans who died by suicide.

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The group was welcomed by Amy Solomon, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Justice Programs, who encouraged the group to offer its best thinking about how to make crime reporting more timely, accurate, and complete. The group then heard from justice data expert Paul Wormeli and working group member Janet Lauritsen, Professor Emerita at University of Missouri-St. Louis. The two summarized the history of crime data reporting in the U.S. and outlined recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Panel on Modernizing the Nation’s Crime Statistics that issued reports on this subject in 2016 and 2018.

The Daubert case introduced a more comprehensive approach that requires judges to scrutinize not only the expert's methodology but also the underlying scientific principles. This shift aimed to curtail the admission of pseudoscientific or unreliable expert testimony. Judges are required to assess the methodology and reasoning behind an expert's opinions, rather than simply relying on the expert's credentials or reputation.

In June, the Crime Trends Working Group convened in Washington, D.C., for an all-day discussion on the Justice Department’s infrastructure for reporting, accessing, and using nationwide crime trend data. The conversation featured a series of presentations on obstacles to implementing the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which replaced the nation’s nearly century-old Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s Summary Reporting System in 2021.