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Firefighter arson a long-standing issue – expert
- walrus01 3mo agoNow do the stats on police and domestic violence.
- tdu01 3mo agoAustralia gets very dry and pretty severe bush fires. We have the same unfortunate phenomena, 2019, 2023 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-31/hunter-valley-rfs-firefighter-charged-lighting-fires/102797026 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-31/hunter-valley-rfs-fir... There is a hero complex associated with this type of occupation, coupled with boredom perhaps. This is however not recurring theme, an anomaly in the statistics. Year on year we do have many brave, volunteer and professional firefighters rescue many properties and lives.
- ikt 3mo ago> Australia gets very dry and pretty severe bush fires. We have the same unfortunate phenomena, 2019 2019 was an American right wing/Facebook/Twitter job to downplay climate change and instead push the narrative that it was all done by arsonists https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-being-spread-through-social-media/11846434 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-... He said the topic appeared to be attracting a "suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts". --- Sad to see that American narrative about Australia still being spread
- keiferski 3mo agoKey information: There’s roughly 100 firefighter arsonists convicted every year in North America and all of them are serial arsonists, which means three or more fires,” Nordskog told CBC. According to Nordskog, firefighter arsonists tend to be young males who recently joined the fire service, who may become bored, desire recognition and struggle with anger or frustration. All things considered, it’s probably a smaller percentage vs. doctors doing un-doctor things, cops, etc.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- alacritas0 3mo agoThis may also be subject to survivorship bias, and there may be a portion of firefighter arsonists who escape prosecution or conviction
- keiferski 3mo agoHow is that any different than any other profession?
- altmanaltman 3mo agoI don't think you can extrapolate it to every profession lol. Even in your example, doctors and cops face much more scrutiny and doing an "undoctor" thing can mean your career is gone. It is far easier for them to comit arson tbh than do the equivalent opposite of their profession's general aims
- defrost 3mo agoDespite which there's a steady trickle of paediatricians (doctors specialising in child care) being rumbled for various forms of child related sexual activity. eg: earlier this month https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-03/perth-paediatrician-chia-liang-saw-talks-to-paedophile-vigilante/106878402 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-03/perth-paediatrician-c...
- altmanaltman 3mo agoPedo is not the opposite of doctor though, is it?
- defrost 3mo agoIt's not conducive to overall child health and well being, so absolutely not what is expected from a paediatrician. Still, if you want to split hairs on various cases, there are the Dr Shipman's straight up killing patients, medical practitioners (nurses and doctors) with Angel of Mercy tendencies, and more than one surgeon with a cutting fetish, eg: Top amputation surgeon had his own legs removed due to a fetish. Were his patients safe? - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/01/neil-hopper-surgeon-amputated-legs-fetish-extreme-mutilation-patients-questions https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/01/neil-hopper-...
- seizethecheese 3mo agoI’m curious what other professions have analogous issues. Police who seed crime? (Surely.) Developers who insert bugs?
- dosisking 3mo agoGarbageman comes to mind
- zaik 3mo ago> Developers who insert bugs I knew it was the developers!
- hackeraccount 3mo agoI mean, it's true isn't it? I guess it's the rare firefighter who unintentionally starts a fire but I guess it's a different game.
- yieldcrv 3mo agoThere is nearly a 100% conviction rate of the closest family member if the spouse/child/parent dies soon after a life insurance policy is created My theory is that there is at least one serial killer that is a life insurance agent or someone that can see all the new policies
- hackeraccount 3mo agoHow would that work? I'm a generous guy, I like to help people. I'm also a psychopath who likes to kill people. Kind of like Robin Hood but slightly crazier I go around murdering people who have just taken out policies to help out their beneficiaries.
- yieldcrv 3mo agoThere is nothing generous about selling life insurance policies so the idea of there being some cognitive dissonance is irreparable flawed Its one of the most unscrupulous sales person industries there is, if not the most based on how tightly (but inadequately) regulated it is Its just a cesspool of chasing leads and commissions from people that don’t actually need what the salesperson is selling and the motive would be unrelated to life insurance, just taking advantage of a gap in the justice system, a sure fire way to get away with it and frame someone
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3mo agoThis is a completely useless article. Is 100 a lot? The article never even hints at what percentage of firefighters that is, let alone total arsonists. Should we be outraged? Are firefighters more likely to be arsonists? It says "in North America", so I assume that's across US and Canada. There are 1.2 million firefighters in the US, and about 150k in Canada, so let's call it 1.3 million. 100 out of 1.3 million is statistically irrelevant. How's that stack up against the general public? That'd be good to know, but the article doesn't touch on it. The latest data i can find is for the US in 2024, where there were 65,795 arson convictions. There are 349 million people in the US, so the number of arsonists is 0.0001% of the general population. The number of firefighters that are arsonists (100/65,795) is 0.0015%, so I suppose it's slightly higher that the general population. All this should have been in the article.
- user- 3mo agoThis 'article' (its a blog post if anything) is based on this this CBC article. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fires-set-by-firefighters-a-long-standing-problem-experts-say-1.3563183 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fires-set-by-firefig... The article refers to a report that 404s. Both the OPs post and the CBC article say records aren't detailed for this so unless theres some studies (lol funding in current political era) you prob will never have real percents. But i think its fair to say yea firefighters are more likely to be arsonists i guess.
- defrost 3mo agoMatt Hinds-Aldrich NVFC papers: Firesetting Firefighters: Reconsidering a Persistent Problem--Firefighter Arson Research ~ https://www.academia.edu/1052901/Firesetting_Firefighters_Reconsidering_a_Persistent_Problem_Firefighter_Arson_Research https://www.academia.edu/1052901/Firesetting_Firefighters_Re... National Volunteer Fire Council - Report on the Firefighter Arson Problem: Contexts, Considerations, and Best Practices ~ https://www.academia.edu/1052842/National_Volunteer_Fire_Council_Report_on_the_Firefighter_Arson_Problem_Contexts_Considerations_and_Best_Practices https://www.academia.edu/1052842/National_Volunteer_Fire_Cou... Firefighter Arson Prevention & Recovery Toolkit - NVFC ~ https://www.academia.edu/3258256/Firefighter_Arson_Prevention_and_Recovery_Toolkit_NVFC https://www.academia.edu/3258256/Firefighter_Arson_Preventio...
- Aurornis 3mo agoI looked it up: About a million firefighters in the US, including volunteer firefighters. Having 1 in 10,000 of them convicted of arson each year is a wild statistic.
- vladmk 3mo agoThis is the fact that’s literally a .0001% chance
- arcanemachiner 3mo ago.01%
- vladmk 3mo agogood point my bad.
- Aurornis 3mo agoYour math is wrong for two reasons. You forgot to multiply by 100. You forgot to multiply by the number of firefighters around you. There is more than one firefighter working in your city or state.
- adityaathalye 3mo agoYour stats sent me into sobering-thoughts-mode... More sobering thought: conviction rates are typically a small percentage of the people who do the foul deed. The definition of "arsonist", for example. What if someone started "just one" fire? A more sobering thought: of the total fires fought each year, how many are started by those rogue firefighters? A most sobering thought: why is it that there is so much fallow time, that they get bored?
- serial_dev 3mo ago[flagged]
- psunavy03 3mo ago> “There’s roughly 100 firefighter arsonists convicted every year in North America and all of them are serial arsonists, which means three or more fires,” OK, so why should I care? A brief Google shows the population of North America at ~600 million people. And the number of firefighters in North America at ~1.3 million. So your likelihood of being victimized by a serial firefighter arsonist is about the same as being struck by lightning, dying in a plane crash, or being killed by a falling coconut.
- kstrauser 3mo agoExcellent point. We absolutely should not care that the people we hire to protect are are sometimes convicted of harming us. It's only a few hundred victims a year so we should utterly ignore that it's happening. That traditionally solves all issues.
- karim79 3mo agoComputer viruses. Anti-virus companies making viruses happens to be one of my favourite conspiracy theories.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bwiksell 3mo agoIsn't half of Canada on fire right now?
- vasco 3mo agoMost guys that go into firefighting really enjoy looking at fire, I can say that much. And this problem exists globally. Maybe we can also ask why women don't join to fight fires and there's 10% or less participation. Compared to police forces globally there's under 10% female firefighters but around 30% female police officers, so it's not as simple as "it's dangerous and women are afraid".
- declan_roberts 3mo agoArsonists drawn to firefighting field. People with mental health issues becoming therapists. People with eating disorders becoming dietitians. I'm trying to figure out what pathology I'm hiding as a software engineer.
- bot403 3mo agoYou're secretly a robot.
- peddling-brink 3mo agoSecretly?
- altairprime 3mo agoCreating problems that can only be solved by writing software! It's a subset of the 'expert user PEBCAK' category — a term any long-term IT help desk professional will recognize immediately, even if they've never encountered it before. Experts create the worst problems and when experts bring the help desk those worst problems, sometimes the reply must be "You caused it, you fix it; or, we can restore your device to an IT-supported state after you backup whatever data you don't want to lose". So, what problems have you created that require you to engineer solutions for them? Did you create those problems intentionally? A lot of us do so in our 'home lab environments', and that's what they're for. But doing so intentionally at work — not accidentally — is called 'making work for yourself so you get paid by someone to fix problems you created', and that is a perfect match for 'firefighter arsonist'. (None of this is accusation, this is just analogy-building; both 'software' and 'you' are swappably generics for any profession and any engineer, respectively.)
- verisimi 3mo agoFor fun, I'll say. You're trying to apply reason to emotion, not realising emotion drives everything. Consequently you think it's acceptable to force everyone to accept (your) superior reasoning, for their own good, whether they want it or not. Think Vulcan.
- roody15 3mo ago
- altairprime 3mo agoOne wonders if the key issue here is 'not enough live fire drills', which while a charming pun I do mean seriously: should every firefighter be guaranteed a certain number of live 'build it and burn it' exercises per year as a condition of employment? If they did so in concert with building code inspectors beforehand to try out various new things, had the 'what were the circumstances leading to this fire?' fire drill conditions sealed in an envelope, and won a pizza party if the arson investigators guessed incorrectly on whether those circumstances were or were not arson — then I think that firefighters might have much less cause for arson. Certainly having done IT for fucking ever, I can come up with some extraordinarily evil things to do, but my industry has 'red teams' and 'onsite penetration tests' because we understand the need for this. TREX apparently conducts 1-2 burns per year as a big serious training event, which is nice — but that's so few and so many fires are so boring and there probably aren't enough TREX burns to meet demand for live fire exercises. And, yes, I wish my own hometown's firefighters would build a structure every month and then burn it to the ground and then try to defeat the arson investigators. This can only reduce the chances of firefighter arson, and no amount of 'firing blanks' exercises are going to have a serious impact on this issue. And, introducing a competitive aspect creates a professional 'hero' outcome for the firefighters who manage to defeat the arson inspectors — they're not only now a hero among their fire industry peers, they're also a hero for the lives that will be saved by future arson investigations solved by their own fire drill arson. Sure, this isn't 'hot neighbor' adulation as many U.S. young men might dream of — but it's peer adulation, and I suspect their dreams would have little difficulty adapting. [1] https://www.waprescribedfire.org/trex https://www.waprescribedfire.org/trex
- ghtbircshotbe 3mo agoThis reminds me of the movie Backdraft, about firefighters and a mysterious arsonist.