Justine Damond, a yoga teacher from Sydney, died in her adopted city of Minneapolis on Saturday from a gunshot fired by an American police officer.

Ms. Damond’s loved ones are desperate for information about what happened, but with the police providing few details, many people in both Australia and the United States are again questioning American police procedure.

What’s driving much of the outrage in Australia is that Ms. Damond was one of more than 500 people shot and killed by the police in the United States this year. And even when population is taken into account, that’s far more than in Australia.

Specifically, the number of people killed this year by the police in the United States is about five times the 105 killed by the police in Australia — from 1989 through 2011.

Put another way, about four people are fatally shot by the Australian police each year, or one per six million people; in the United States, that’s about one in 333,000.

What accounts for the disparity?

Vince Hurley, a criminologist at Macquarie University, said it’s partly because American law enforcement relies so heavily on guns.

In Australia, he said, “the reason there have been less shootings is police now have a wider range of nonlethal weapons.” Pepper spray has been standard since the early 2000s, he said. Tasers have been deployed extensively over the past several years.