Almost a week ago, following calls from the streets for “police reform” in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his Police Chief responded by disbanding the city’s more than 600-person plainclothes anti-crime unit. (Because your go-to move when facing a rolling series of riots and arson attacks is to dump your anti-crime unit.) That seemed to please at least some of the anti-cop activists and agitators while scaring the bejesus out of homeowners and small businesses. So how’s that decision working out for them so far? According to the New York Post and some of the NYPD men and women in blue who haven’t been canceled yet, pretty much as you probably would have predicted. Shootings and murders have shot up – pun intended – with violent crime rates more than double the same period last year.

Shootings are surging this week in New York City, with 27 incidents and 36 victims reported since Monday — the day the NYPD disbanded its plainclothes anti-crime unit, The Post learned on Friday.

By comparison, the same week last year there were only 12 shootings for the entire week.

“This is what the politicians wanted — no bail, nobody in Rikers, cops not arresting anyone,” one angry law enforcement source said Friday.

“All those things equal people walking around on the street with guns, shooting each other.”

Who could possibly have predicted this? The shootings, all of which took place in less than a week, included at least four murders in Brooklyn, the Bronx and East New York. That last one probably shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, since East New York resembles a war zone on the best of days. But the others have been taking place in neighborhoods where crime levels have been far more under control for years.

As far as Brooklyn goes, there were five shootings there just on Thursday night. To put this in perspective, the city recorded 97 shootings in just the first couple of weeks of June. Last year there were 87 shootings in the entire month.

A certain number of these incidents can probably be written off to gang members taking advantage of the protests and riots to go out and settle a few scores. The police are so tied up keeping track of all the demonstrations and trying to prevent more businesses – and their own squad cars – from being torched that there isn’t enough time or resources to cover their usual beats. That’s going to lead to some opportunism on the part of New York’s gangs. None of that comes as any consolation to the pedestrians who are just trying to avoid becoming part of the body count, however.

This is also a good moment to stop and ask ourselves just how these gun crime rates are spiraling upward so quickly. This is New York City. It has some of the harshest gun control laws in the entire country. It’s nearly impossible to legally purchase a firearm there no matter how pristine your record is. You’d think halting nearly all gun sales would cut down on gun crimes, wouldn’t you? At least that’s the theory the Democrats generally run with.

As has been discussed here repeatedly, Mayor Bill de Blasio has had a terrible relationship with the NYPD and the police unions from day one. His willingness to jump on every social justice bandwagon that rolls down Fifth Avenue and blame the police before the criminals hasn’t exactly done much for morale among the troops. And his willingness to “defund the police” just as Gotham is seeing its first serious increase in violent crime rates after decades of progress isn’t helping matters. Don’t be shocked if you see the “blue flu” spreading into the Big Apple in the near future, both in solidarity with other police forces around the country and in response to the way they’ve been hung out to dry on their home turf.