Bincount on Array

import numpy as np
l = ['toronto', 'montreal', 'montreal', 'toronto', 'waterloo', 'waterloo', 'toronto']
a, b = np.unique(l, return_counts=True)
a
array(['montreal', 'toronto', 'waterloo'], dtype='<U8')

b
array([2, 3, 2])

You can achieve the same by using Pandas

import pandas as pd
c = pd.get_dummies(l)
c
montreal toronto waterloo
0 0 1 0
1 1 0 0
2 1 0 0
3 0 1 0
4 0 0 1
5 0 0 1
6 0 1 0 
pd.get_dummies(l).sum()
montreal    2
toronto     3
waterloo    2
dtype: int64