Cops in one US city killed more people in 5 months than Icelandic police have in 71 years

The Guardian's new project, The Counted, is trying to track every police killing in the United States in 2015.  The project is still gathering data, but has already put together preliminary numbers for the first few months of this year. On Tuesday, Guardian reporter Jamiles Larty compared the data to similar numbers about police in other countries — and the results were stunning. Not only has the US already had more police killings in five months than most other countries have had in decades, some individual US cities have too.

The comparisons are shocking — even when you account for population
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Here is a sample of some of the most disturbing facts that Larty's analysis revealed:

• Police in Stockton, California killed three times as many people in 2015 as Icelandic police ever have: Stockton has slightly more people than Iceland does. Stockton police killed three people in the first five months of 2015; Icelandic police have only killed one person in the country's entire 71 year history.
• Police in Pasco, Washington fired more bullets in one fatal shooting than Finnish police did in all of 2013: There are about 80 times as many people in Finland as there are in Pasco. Finnish police fired 6 bullets in 2013; Pasco officers fired 17 when they shot and killed Antonio Zambrano-Montes in February 2015. According to investigators, Zambrano-Montes was armed only with a rock.
• More unarmed black men were killed by police in the US in 2015 than people of any race were killed by German cops in two years. Germany's population is about a fourth of US's total population, but there are roughly twice as many Germans as there are African-Americans. According to the Guardian's data, 19 unarmed black men have been killed by US police in 2015 so far. By contrast, German police shot a total of 15 people, both armed and unarmed, between 2010 and 2011.
• America's guns: the real issue?

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