The data set that I decided to “interview” is somewhat similar to the one we interviewed in class. I pulled the database of employee salaries for the city of Baltimore. The data is separated into seven columns; name, job title, agency identification number, hire date, annual salary, and gross pay. The 13819 rows are the names of various employees in the city of Baltimore. The objective in looking at this particular set of data is to look at the salaries of city employees. There is a category available in this dataset that wasn’t in the dataset for the city of Chicago, gross pay. In this instance, the annual salary is essentially what a city employee is guaranteed to make based on an hourly wage. Gross pay, factors in things like overtime. If a city employee works overtime and is then compensated for that overtime, then their gross pay will be higher than their annual salary.
Looking at the dataset, we can see how this information affects the way the information can be interpreted. Looking at annual salary only, we can easily see the city employees that have the highest annual salary and the the city employees with the lowest annual salary are 21 election judges. The individual with the highest annual salary is the State’s Attorney, Marilyn J. Mosby. At $238,772, Mosby earns more than the police commissioner and the mayor whose annual salaries are $200,000 and $171,635 respectively. If the table is adjusted and organized by gross pay, then the income of these individuals changes. In this instance, the employee with the highest gross pay is a police sergeant by the name of William Harris Jr. Mosby comes in second behind him. After that, the majority of the next 100 employees are all in the police department and range from lieutenants to officers. Many of these officers are making more than the mayor. Overtime is one of the ways to best ways to explain this. An online publication called The Baltimore Brew, described in detail how police officers were recording hours of overtime and that this is what led to the salary increase in so many members of police department.
[At first glance](<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17iksymhxI8OZYGSoY94gcM1J2T7leUt2AinK4GyTl2E/pubhtml?gid=698358859&single=true&widget=true&headers=false"></iframe>), this seems like a a lot of money is going to one department in the city. A number of the titles for the individuals who have the highest gross pay are police and are in the police department. What Baltimore does differently than Chicago is separate departments within departments. Each of these departments have their own unique department code to help identify a city agency. For example, Police Sergeant William Harris Jr, belongs to police department agency 307. A few rows below him, still in the top ten of the highest gross pay of city employees, are Police Lieutenants Stephen C Nalewajko Jr. and Mark J. Camarote, both belonging to police department agency 260. After sorting the pivot table into [another sheet](<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17iksymhxI8OZYGSoY94gcM1J2T7leUt2AinK4GyTl2E/pubhtml?gid=803304976&single=true&widget=true&headers=false"></iframe>), we see that the agency with the highest average gross pay is police department agency 336. The highest median gross pay and the highest sum gross pay is police department agency 322.
(<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17iksymhxI8OZYGSoY94gcM1J2T7leUt2AinK4GyTl2E/pubhtml?gid=479962808&single=true&widget=true&headers=false"></iframe>)
Adding percentages makes this data even easier to interpret. If we add a percent of the total column, and sort it so that the department with the highest percentage is at the top, police department agency 322 has the highest percentage of the total with .47. If I were going to do a story, I would look into what the different police agencies mean and see if they correlate with a specific region of the city or if there are any individuals receiving a higher amount than other and if their names come up in any sort of report of any kind. This way, I would be able to determine if there is a story regarding the Baltimore Police department and with particular police agency in particular.