Calgary Police: A+. Leaving crisis decisions to a computer: #Fail.

That’s the social media report card out of flooded Calgary following a Twitter lockdown that silenced the police department’s emergency tweets late Thursday until an outcry on the social media stream prompted the social media company to release the police from “Twitter jail” a few hours later.

“I’m surprised it got shut down,” said Simon Fraser University communication professor Peter Chow-White. “People have been thinking of Twitter as reliable, it seemed to be reliable during Hurricane Sandy, during the bombings in Boston — you didn’t hear stories about Twitter shutting anything down.

“Twitter has become really important for crisis communications.”

Twitter jail is a term used online for what happens when you tweet too often. According to Twitter rules, users are limited to 1,000 tweets (including retweets) per day, with smaller limits governing “semi-hourly intervals.”

“The tweet limit of 1,000 updates per day is further broken down into semi-hourly intervals,” Twitter says in its rules. “If you hit your account update/tweet limit, please try again in a few hours after the limit period has elapsed.”

Chow-White said the incident shows the risks in leaving decisions in a crisis to a computer algorithm.

“I wouldn’t say Twitter failed, I would say (Twitter’s) computer algorithm failed,” he said.

“When algorithms make decisions in a moment of crisis, those decisions have consequences,” he said. “Automated systems can have failures and this was obviously a failure of an automated system.”

In the Alberta flooding crisis, Calgary Police — tweeting as @CalgaryPolice — have been a go-to source, answering questions and sharing information with a constant Twitter stream. The account was locked when it reached a daily limit but quick-thinking constable Jeremy Shaw of the department’s Digital Communications Unit stepped in to post official information on his own account to keep the information flowing until Twitter lifted the tweet ban.

Chow-White said since emergency services in other crisis situations didn’t appear to suffer a similar problem, it could be that the Calgary Police account just wasn’t recognized for what it is.

“Maybe Twitter isn’t aware the Calgary Police account is the Calgary Police because they’re outside the U.S.”

Chow-White gives high marks to the Calgary Police department’s use of Twitter during the crisis. A read of the Calgary Police Twitter stream indicates it is answering questions as well as broadcasting information to help people cope with the rising flood waters.

“It is fantastic they are engaging people,” he said. “I have seen police agencies use Twitter as a one-way medium.

“You have to stop seeing Twitter as a broadcast medium to put information out and see it as a way of engaging the community.”

That is a lesson the Vancouver police department learned when it faced its first real crisis after starting to use Twitter, Vancouver’s 2011 hockey riots. Since its early days on Twitter, the VPD — tweeting under the profile @VancouverPD — has broadened its engagement, answering questions and interacting with the online community as well as sharing news and information.