On March 14, 2018, Rio de Janeiro councillor Marielle Franco was murdered – shot multiple times in a crime that remains unsolved.

Franco’s death caused commotion throughout Brazil, and even internationally as she was a politician with a strong social commitment who had been denouncing the growth of armed militias in the city. But some of the first people to find out about the incident weren’t the police or the media, but users of an app called Fogo Cruzado, which alerts people to potential shooting incidents across Rio de Janeiro so that they can avoid the area.

“I was the person who gave the shooting alert in downtown Rio – only later I found out it was Marielle,” says the app’s founder Cecilia Oliveira, a journalist and specialist in public security and drug policy.

Full article at Wired UK’s website. Date of publication: 25/04/2021.

Originally published in Wired UK’s May/June print edition.