A local criminologist says it’s important to keep recent gang shootings in perspective after three men were killed on New Year’s Day, triggering a deluge of news coverage about the deaths and the gangs that caused them.

“Too much attention creates a sense of moral panic, and people lose perspective of the fact that it’s not the only problem in the city,” says John Winterdyk, chair of the justice studies program at Mount Royal College. “Yes, it’s something that deserves attention, but it’s not something that perhaps is as grevious as it’s being made out to be.”

On the afternoon of January 1, three men were shot and killed at a Vietnamese restaurant on Macleod Trail S.E. Police say the first man was a gang member, the second was his “associate” and the third was an innocent bystander “who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Winterdyk says that while Calgarians are obviously upset about the innocent man’s death, constant reportage on gang shootings can have unintended consequences. “They thrive on that kind of stuff,” he says. “These two gangs that are feuding like crazy, they’re gaining a lot of momentum and impetus from having their name, or what they’re doing, splashed on the front page.”

Last September, city council approved a plan to add 200 new police officers over three years. Winterdyk says police departments and governments are starting to understand that a “multi-faceted approach” is needed to curb gang activity. “More officers, to an extent, are needed because you need to have a degree of police presence,” he says. “But people shouldn’t perceive it as, ‘Oh yeah, if we hire 500 more, we can eradicate the problem. That isn’t going to happen…. The causes of why people turn to crime is not related to police presence or non-police presence.”

The real challenge, says Winterdyk, is dealing with the social ailments that foster crime. “You’ll never have a perfect utopian world, but if you can make a more harmonious society, then you’ll be able to abate a lot of the problems,” he says.