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Every Brevard County booking from April 22 to May 21. Who is being arrested, for what, and how the numbers fit the bigger picture.

A Space Coast Rocket data analysis

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Each morning, The Space Coast Rocket publishes the previous day’s arrests from the Brevard County Sheriff’s records. Taken one day at a time, those posts are a roster of names and mugshots. Stacked together over a month, they become something more useful: a portrait of who passes through the Brevard County Jail Complex, and why.

We pulled together every daily arrest post from April 22 through May 21, 2026 and tallied the booking records behind them. The result is 1,217 arrests carrying 2,162 separate charges. Here is what the month looked like.

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Before the numbers: An arrest is an accusation, not a conviction. Everyone counted here is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court. These are booking records logged by the Sheriff’s Office at intake; charges are frequently reduced, refiled, or dropped entirely as cases move through the system.

The big picture: about 41 a day

Across the 30 days, the jail booked an average of 40.6 people per day. Daily counts were remarkably steady; never fewer than 26 (May 10) and never more than 50, a ceiling hit on four separate days (April 28, May 2, May 7 and May 21). There was no clear weekday-versus-weekend spike; arrests rolled in at a consistent clip all month.

If that pace held for a full year, it would work out to roughly 14,800 bookings annually, the equivalent of one booking for about every 45 residents of the county, which the state puts at roughly 667,900 people as of April 2025. (That figure counts booking events, not unique people; someone arrested twice in a month is counted twice.) For scale, the Brevard County Jail Complex run by Sheriff Wayne Ivey houses on the order of 1,600 inmates on a typical day.

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What people are arrested for

The single most striking pattern is how few of these bookings involve the violent crime that dominates headlines. By far the largest drivers are warrants and court-process violations, drugs, traffic offenses and low-level batteries. Because one person can face charges in several categories at once, the figures below overlap and do not add to 100 percent; each counts the number of people booked with at least one charge of that type.

The most common individual charges tell the same story: probation violations (141), possession of a controlled substance without a prescription (134), drug paraphernalia (109), simple or domestic battery (98), resisting an officer without violence (84) and DUI–alcohol (79). Nearly one in five people booked — the 212 in the warrants-and-violations group — were taken in not for a fresh offense at all, but on an outstanding warrant, a failure to appear in court, or a probation violation.

That mirrors the national pattern almost exactly. The Vera Institute has found that low-level offenses such as drug-abuse violations and disorderly conduct account for more than 80 percent of all arrests, while serious violent offenses make up fewer than 5 percent. In our Brevard sample, homicide, sex crimes, robbery and kidnapping combined account for just over 4 percent of bookings. The jail, in other words, functions far more as a processing hub for warrants, addiction-related charges and traffic cases than as a holding pen for violent predators.

Who is being booked

Sex

Men accounted for 901 bookings (74 percent) and women for 316 (26 percent), nearly a three-to-one split that holds steady across most charge types. The imbalance is widest for the most serious categories: every one of the 15 sex-crime arrests and both homicide-related arrests involved men, and domestic-violence arrests skewed 48 men to 7 women. Drug and DUI arrests were the most evenly distributed, though still majority male.

Age

The average age at booking was 40.6 years, ranging from 15 to 82. Arrests clustered firmly in middle age rather than among the very young: people aged 25 to 54 made up 71 percent of all bookings, with the 35-to-44 band the single largest group. Only two arrestees were under 18, and 68 (about 6 percent) were 65 or older.

Race

This is where the booking data diverges most sharply from the county it serves. Brevard’s population is roughly 70 percent White, 12 percent Hispanic and 9 percent Black. Among the month’s arrests, the proportions look very different:

Black residents make up roughly one in eleven Brevard residents but nearly one in three people booked — an overrepresentation of more than three to one. That gap is real and worth naming, but it should be read with care. Arrest and booking figures reflect a tangle of factors, where police patrol most heavily, which neighborhoods generate the most calls for service, poverty and housing patterns, and bail and warrant practices, not any inherent propensity of one group. National research consistently shows that booking disparities track enforcement and socioeconomic conditions justas much as underlying behavior.

One technical caveat sharpens the point: the Sheriff’s Office records race and ethnicity separately, and many Hispanic arrestees are logged with a race of “White.” That almost certainly understates the true Hispanic share shown above and inflates the White count, so the Hispanic line in particular should be treated as a floor, not a precise figure.

The serious cases — rare, but present

Behind the aggregate counts are the cases that matter most to public safety. Over the 30 days, the data flagged 55 people facing domestic-violence charges, 33 with charges involving abuse, neglect or crimes against children, 15 facing sex crimes, and two arrests tied to a death. These are the cases our newsroom watches most closely.

Domestic violence deserves special attention because it bucks the broader trend. Even as Florida’s overall crime fell to historic lows — statewide crime dropped sharply in 2024 — the state’s Department of Children and Families has reported domestic-violence offenses ticking slightly upward. Florida logged roughly 309 domestic-violence offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024. At 55 arrests in a single month, Brevard is squarely on that map, a reminder that the most common serious violence in the county happens not between strangers but inside homes.

Why so many warrants and violations? Look at the jail itself

The prominence of warrants, failures to appear and probation violations, that 17 percent slice is not a Brevard quirk. It reflects how the American jail system actually works. At midyear 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 69 percent of everyone held in local jails had not been convicted of anything, they were awaiting court action. A separate analysis found that about 62 percent of people in jail are held on a non-violent top charge, public-order, property, drug, DUI or traffic offenses.

That national context explains the shape of our local month: a steady flow of people cycling through intake on warrants, missed court dates, license suspensions and addiction-driven charges, with violent felonies the exception rather than the rule. It is a portrait less of a crime wave than of a busy administrative pipeline, one that nonetheless touches more than a thousand Brevard families every single month.

How we did this

These figures were compiled from The Space Coast Rocket’s own daily arrest posts for April 22 through May 21, 2026, which are drawn directly from the Brevard County Sheriff’s public inmate-search records. We counted each booking once and tagged charges into categories using keyword matching on the official charge titles. That method is necessarily approximate: Florida’s combined charge labels (for example, “Battery — Touch Strike / DV / Dating Viol”) blur domestic, dating and simple battery together, so the domestic-violence count is a reasonable indicator rather than an exact tally. Charge categories overlap, and the totals describe accusations at the moment of booking — not convictions, and not the final disposition of any case. All suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Sources

• Arrest data: The Space Coast Rocket daily arrest reports, drawn from the Brevard County Sheriff inmate search
• Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research — Brevard County population estimate, 2025
• U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts — Brevard County demographics
• Brevard County Sheriff’s Office — Jail Complex
• U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics — Jails, 2024 preliminary data
• Prison Policy Initiative — offense data for people in local jails
• Vera Institute of Justice — arrest trends
• USAFacts — Florida crime rate
• Florida Department of Children and Families — Domestic Violence Annual Report; Florida domestic-violence statistics, 2024