Gun violence is on the rise in Rio de Janeiro, with the sound of shootouts echoing daily across Brazil’s seaside city as drug gangs battle each other and police officers patrolling slums.



Now a pair of applications track in real-time how many gun battles there are and where they occur, based on accounts from eyewitnesses, the media and police.

The Fogo Cruzado, or “crossfire”, application created by Amnesty International and local researchers aims to help Rio’s citizens keep them out of danger.

A second application called Onde Tem Tiroteio – “where are the firefights” – has similar objectives.

“Our job here is not to denounce anyone, we do not have a direct focus on the police or on the drug gangs,” Henrique Coelho Caamaño, a volunteer who helps maintain the Onde Tem Tiroteio app, said this week. “Our focus is really to get people out of the way of stray bullets.”

While Rio is long used to random gunfire in or close to its nearly 1,000 favelas, the city has been stunned by a rash of stray bullets hitting innocent bystanders – including a baby boy struck last week while still in his mother’s womb.

Murders jumped 11% to 2,329 in Rio de Janeiro state in the first five months of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the most recent data available from the state’s security secretariat.

The number of people killed by police in shootouts during the first five months of this year jumped nearly 50% compared with the same months the previous year, totalling 480 deaths.

But Rio state authorities do not keep track of the number of people hit by stray bullets, saying that since no such category of crime exists in Brazil’s legal system authorities would not be able to come up with an accurate way of measuring it.

But the number of stray bullet reports in Rio’s local press has been rising along with the overall increase in violence.

Last Friday, Claudineia dos Santos, who was nine months pregnant, was struck by a stray bullet that also hit the spine of her unborn boy, Arthur. Police and drug gangs had been in a firefight in the northern Rio slum where the woman lives.

After an emergency caesarean, doctors said the boy was on life support and left a paraplegic. The mother was in a stable condition.

On the same day a 76-year-old woman and her 42-year-old daughter were killed by stray bullets in northern Rio’s Mangueira slum, as police and drug gang members exchanged fire.