The ACLU got the data on killings through a public-records request. The 610 police homicides that the state recorded exclude deaths ruled “accidental” or “natural,” suicides, killings still under investigation, and cases where cause of death is undetermined.

​The civil-liberties organization found that 598 of the 610 people were shot to death. Here’s a breakdown:

The ACLU’s analysis also probed where the killings took place. In raw numbers, Los Angeles County led the state in police killings with 194. The LAPD killed 87 people, while the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department killed 55 people—32 in its primary jurisdiction, and 23 more in jurisdictions that contract with it for policing services. An argument could be made that improvements to policing in L.A. County would save the most lives.

On the other hand, police in Kern County killed the most people per capita: 3.54 people for every 100,000 residents. Butte County law enforcement killed 7 people, or 3.1 for every 100,000 residents. And police in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties killed 58 and 63 people respectively, both at a rate of roughly 2.7 people per 100,000 residents. That could indicate inferior policing practices in those counties.

Here are the police killing figures for some of California’s most populous counties:

Are police in San Diego, San Francisco, and Fresno counties doing something right, or is their lower rate of killing people attributable to other factors? If other counties could achieve the lowest rate, a significant number of lives could be spared.

Here are the years when the 610 killings took place. Notice that at least part of the variance seems to be explained by something other than the overall homicide rate:

Again, the 2014 number is likely to rise as investigations are concluded and cases shift in the state database from “unknown” cause of death to death by “homicide.”

How does California stack up against other countries?

Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post observes that “there were no fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada—a country with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms—police shootings average about a dozen a year.”

It is also useful to juxtapose these numbers with The Guardian’s findings in its effort to track all police killings in the United States this year. After just ten months, it has documented 149 people killed by law enforcement in California during 2015, another indication that the official California figures are too low. The Guardian counts “any deaths arising directly from encounters with law enforcement. This will inevitably include, but will likely not be limited to, people who were shot, tasered and struck by police vehicles as well those who died in police custody.”