At 1930 Research LLC, we specialize in helping organizations make sense of complex crime data - whether from a single spreadsheet or managing a database with hundreds of tables. Our team has supported local governments, national nonprofits, and academic researchers with high-stakes data challenges. We bring deep technical expertise, extensive experience with law enforcement practices and data, and a commitment to making every step clear and useful.

Many of our clients have deep subject matter expertise but don’t specialize in data infrastructure or statistical programming - and they don’t need to. We provide the structure, guidance, and technical solutions to ensure your data work is grounded, reliable, and useful. We support every step of the process: from assessing whether your data is usable, to cleaning and standardizing it, to building efficient reporting tools and training your staff to use them. We often begin projects with a short data audit to assess structure, completeness, and reliability.

Data Cleaning, Integration, and Automation

Crime data is often inconsistent, poorly documented, and difficult to work with. We have extensive experience transforming these datasets into clean, structured formats that support meaningful analysis and reporting. This is often the most technically challenging stage - and one where our clients see the most immediate value.

We address problems like missing values, mismatched codes, changing formats over time, and unclear or missing documentation. If the data isn’t reliable, we’ll let you know early so you can avoid wasted time or misleading results.

Our services include:

  • Identifying and flagging missing or unreliable data

  • Standardizing and cleaning values across time, systems, and agencies

  • Creating practical categories such as offense types, geographic units, or time periods

  • Merging and linking datasets across databases or jurisdictions

  • Aggregating and reshaping data into usable formats like years, beats, shifts, or blocks

For recurring reports and workflows, we can automate these processes using reproducible code. Automation reduces manual errors, saves staff time, and ensures consistency across repeated reports. We help clients build workflows that can be maintained and adapted over time. We deliver all scripts and documentation, so your team can use and adapt them independently.

Visualization and Reporting

Communicating crime data is often as challenging as analyzing it. Poorly chosen visuals can confuse stakeholders or misrepresent what the data actually show. We help clients avoid these pitfalls by creating clear, accurate graphs, maps, and tables tailored to specific goals.

We work with clients to identify the most appropriate visualization formats, whether that’s a time-series graph, a heat map, or a summary table, and ensure each output is labeled clearly, easy to interpret, and well-documented.

We also produce written reports that describe the structure of the original data, document the steps we took to clean and prepare it, and summarize key descriptive findings. With expertise in writing academic publications, technical documents, and litigation-related reports, we tailor our writing to meet each client’s specific needs.

Analysis

While we do not focus primarily on statistical analysis, we can support clients who need basic descriptive summaries or comparisons across time and groups. In these cases, we prioritize clarity, transparency, and alignment with what the data can reasonably show.

Our work is always grounded in realistic expectations and avoids overstating what the data supports. When needed, we provide documented outputs that help clients understand key trends or evaluate changes over time.

Accurate and meaningful analysis requires clean data as its foundation. We prepare and structure crime data so that analysis - whether performed by us or others - can produce valid and trustworthy results.

Training and Workshops

We help teams build practical skills in R for cleaning, analysis, and visualization - using their own data and workflows. Our workshops are practical and grounded in real datasets - not theoretical exercises.

We tailor each session to your team’s goals and current skill level. Participants leave with reusable code and step-by-step workflows they can apply immediately.

Training topics include:

  • Data cleaning and transformation

  • Automating recurring reports

  • Creating reproducible visualizations and dashboards

  • Working with crime datasets like CAD, RMS, or UCR

For a formal summary of our capabilities and past performance, download our Capability Statement.

Ready to unlock the full potential of your data? Contact us for a consultation or data audit to discuss your project and how we can help.