It’s time for a sense of proportion about the increase in shootings and murders in New York City in the first five months of 2015.

While it’s true that both categories have risen over last year’s low numbers, the increase is not a harbinger of collapsing law enforcement or crime raging out of control, as some local columnists would have it. Nor is it evidence that the steep decrease over the past four years in reasonable-suspicion stops — or “stop-and-frisks,” as they’re colloquially known — has caused the increase in shootings.

The armchair criminologists writing these columns are verging on hysteria with their predictions of impending doom. As of the end of May, we were up 22 murders citywide and 33 shootings over a period of five months in a city of 8.5 million people. Back in 1993, when we averaged about 37 murders and 100 shootings per week, these recent increases would not have amounted to even a week’s worth of murders and shootings.

As both Chief of Department James O’Neill and I have made abundantly clear, we don’t take any comfort that these increases are relatively small because, regardless of the number, each incident represents a life ended or blighted by injury or a life of imprisonment for a young, impulsive perpetrator. On the other hand, to suggest that this relatively minor increase has been caused by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s opposition to reasonable-suspicion stops is a ludicrous misrepresentation.

In 2011, the NYPD reported about 685,000 reasonable-suspicion stops. That year, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries and grand larcenies all increased, for an overall rise in index crime of 1.5 percent. Last year, stops had been cut to about 47,400 — or by more than 90 percent — and murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary and grand larceny were all down, for an overall decline in index crime of 4.1 percent.

In 2011, there were 515 murders and 1,510 shootings. In 2014, there were 333 murders and 1,171 shootings. Clearly, the supposed relationship between decreasing stops and increasing crime is not supported by the numbers.

This is not the first time murders or shootings have risen in recent years. Murders were up in 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2010. Shootings were up in 2002, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2011. Yet, even with these increases, the past two years have seen the lowest levels in shootings since 1993 and the lowest levels in murder since 1957.

As anyone who has done professional crime analysis can tell you, these numbers tend to move in ranges, with small upticks in some years and some categories, even during periods when overall crime is declining.

The NYPD has plans to counter the current rise in shootings, including reinforcing patrols this summer with police officers who usually do administrative work, and targeted investigations of known gangs and shooters. We may be able to moderate the increase or even reverse it over the summer.

But even if we don’t succeed, the current rise is not the earth-shaking event that has been pictured. By far, the largest and most dense city in the United States remains an extraordinarily safe environment, with the lowest property-crime rates among the nation’s 25 largest cities and a murder rate lower than the nation’s as a whole.

William J. Bratton is the city’s police commissioner.