UPDATE, 5:06 PM: In an email, a police spokesman said the agency was reversing course and would continue to post tweets about every reported shooting in the city. A full update will follow.
The Baltimore Police Department says it will scale back its use of Twitter to alert residents to crime incidents in the city, the agency's chief spokesman confirmed.
For years, the city has used its @BaltimorePolice Twitter account to put out alerts within 20 minutes or so of every confirmed shooting or homicide. It has helped the agency gain nearly 40,000 followers.
But over the weekend, four shootings occurred without notifications going out on Twitter. Brief summaries of the incidents were e-mailed to the media, with the agency account instead updating followers on gun arrests and a community event in Northwest Baltimore.
Jack Papp, the agency's new spokesman, said that the decision was made recently not to post every shooting. He cited some recent cases where circumstances surrounding a shooting had changed after a tweet had been posted.
"The department is not going to tweet out every time a drug dealer shoots another criminal in the leg for non-payment - i.e. criminal on criminal crime that we know," Papp wrote in an email. "We will still tweet out instances where non fatal shootings involve citizens, public safety issues, etc. in real time as well as homicides."
The agency was one of the first in the country to use Twitter to inform residents about crime, though other police departments now provide far more information about crimes. The Fraternal Order of Police president chastised the department earlier this year for not providing more information through Twitter.