We here at the wonderful website of Brevard Outlook, with high hopes that we’ll be a popular stomping ground for locals thought that we’d like to do a little something to give back to the community. Like our local paper, we thought we’d like to display a single block showcasing a most-wanted criminal that the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) is looking for.

As anyone who’s looked through the newspaper’s version can tell you, it is not always up to date. Some of the fugitives have actually been captured. Call us crazy, but when you show people a most wanted person, they should be, well, wanted. Not captured. Else, people will begin to ignore it and what good would that do us? Of course, the fugitives would like it, but we aren’t interested in their opinion.

Well, weren’t we surprised to find that that the BCSO doesn’t actually have an RSS feed of its fugitives. They, apparently, manually place each criminal up one at a time. They don’t even bother optimizing the image (see their list here). So, what does that mean for all of us? It means no website in Brevard, of which there are thousands, can easily place a most wanted feed on their site to help the BCSO do its job. We’d like to say this is a hot new feature and that the BCSO is learning all about it. But it’s at least three years old (in the public mainstream) and the technology itself is about seven years old.

Maybe the Board of County Commissioners should make any future budget increase requests contingent upon the BCSO joining us here in the 2000’s so that, as a community, we can all do better. It hardly makes much sense for them to authorize the purchase of additional patrol cars, radio towers, and personnel, when they seem to be overlooking something very simple that could, in the long run, catch more criminals than a new deputy will in a lifetime.