Shootings are up 76 percent in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s (D) New York City, the Wall Street Journal reports.

According to WSJ, the 76 percent increase manifests when comparing number of shootings January 1, 2020, through August 2, 2020, with the number that occurred during that same period the year prior.

The paper also notes an 81 percent increase in shooting victims for the same comparative interval.

There were 237 homicides in NYC January 1, 2020, through August 2, 2020, compared to 181 for those dates in 2019.

NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea pointed to various contributing factors in commenting on the surge in shootings. Two of those factors were “changes to state bail laws and the release of prisoners from city jails during the pandemic as reasons for the uptick in crime.”

By March 31, 2020, The Hill reported that de Blasio had “released 900 inmates to avoid the risk of coronavirus spreading in the city’s jails.”

Commissioner Shea also cited “recent changes to policing” and the decision to remove $1 billion from the NYPD, according to WSJ.

On June 21, 2020, Breitbart News reported that shooting surged in NYC after NYPD’s plain clothes anti-crime unit was disbanded.

A similar occurrence was seen in Portland, Oregon, after the City Council there cut funding, forcing the police bureau to eliminate the Gun Violence Reduction Team. The team was eliminated on July 1, 2020, and that was followed by weeks of shootings that resulted in more murders in July 2020 than the city of Portland had witnessed in a single month in over 30 years.

The Oregonian reported there were 63 shootings in Portland in July 2020, versus 28 for the same month in 2019.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.