Firefighter arson a long-standing issue – expert

Key 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.

Australia 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-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.

I’m curious what other professions have analogous issues.

Police who seed crime? (Surely.)

Developers who insert bugs?

Arsonists 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.

I 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.

One 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

This 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.

Most 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".

Computer viruses. Anti-virus companies making viruses happens to be one of my favourite conspiracy theories.

> “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.

Now do the stats on police and domestic violence.

Isn't half of Canada on fire right now?