> more than 100 firefighters in the United States were arrested each year on arson charges
While I knew this was a thing, if I had to guess before reading this article, I probably would have said it was a dozen or so per year. That it's in the triple digits is quite disturbing.
As an aside, this is why Richard Jewell was incorrectly pegged as the suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing; he was a loser who did something heroic, so the authorities and media rushed to judgement. Sadly for everyone in this case, Jewell was a legitimate hero in this instance. Imagine having your life ruined at 33; truly no good deed goes unpunished.
I remember when Jewell’s home was searched by law enforcement. A network reporter, whom I understood was from NYC, looked into the camera and intoned that law enforcement had discovered nails and duct tape in Jewell’s garage.
I remember thinking, “You elitist snob. If you weren’t an East Coast weenie living in an apartment, you would know that nails and duct tape could be found in 99% of the garages in America.”
A funny story that emerged out of the movie was that actress/feminazi Olivia Wilde played a slut reporter who was happily hopping on an FBI agent's crotch for information and is the key accuser of Jewell at first, ruining his reputation. Female reporters and feminists complained about this portrayal, even though its an open secret that this is how most female reporters get their scoops. (e.g. the recent blowup with slut Olivia Nuzzi polishing RFK Jr.'s fishing tackle).
Wilde came out after the movie and lamented its portrayal of her character as a career-driven, easy slut willing to lie to harm a man's reputation. That's right, she was taking shots at Eastwood and at a film she'd been given a plum role in. All for feminism.
Wilde is the privileged daughter of internationally-famous and wealthy journalists. A good-looking girl when young, she decided that portraying a smug bisexual slut mud shark on House who acted like a bitch all the time was a good career move. Shockingly (/s), she never was able to parlay that into being a major star (although she was given major roles in big budget movies, likely for casting couch gifts), and so has tried her hand at directing making, *sigh*, two feminist movies: a coming-of-age teenage movie and a horror/thriller movie. The movies received feminist critical acclaim but no audiences watched them because they're bad Message Movies. (The horror/thriller movie has a distinction of being one where she claimed that she fired Shia LeBouf and LeBouf claimed he quit and backed this up by releasing a voicemail from Wilde begging him to come back/not quit, thus proving Wilde a liar).
My guess is Wilde was selected by Eastwood as a conniving career-driven slut feminazi willing to lie to help her own interests because of typecasting. Her post-film reaction only solidifies Eastwood's choice.
Sure, but if you Google it (you did Google it, right?) you quickly see that the chosen definition of "firefighter" will massively swing the results, by as much as several hundred percent.
So, 1 in 10,000. But if you narrow "firefighters" to only career firefighters, from whose ranks firebugs may be disproportionately drawn, then the number is more like 1 in 3000, which means that if your town has, say, 1000 firefighters, there is a 1 in 3 chance that someone on the force is setting more fires than the force is extinguishing, which is not too reassuring.
Then consider that the 100 or so numerator represents only the ones who get caught and prosecuted. If the number who are undetected or un-arrested and covered up to avoid a scandal are similar to the convicted number, then ... uh-oh: any large town firefighting force might be harboring a secret firebug.
The FBI should be studying what personality quirks and histories to screen for and what triggering events get them started. Maybe someone has, and they're too close to what makes a good fireman. Or as Tolstoy wrote, "each pyro is a pyro in his own way."
By the way, speaking of need for dominance, last week, I read Joseph Wambaugh’s true crime book Fire Lover about John Orr, the veteran Glendale (California) Fire Department arson investigator. He became a legend in the arson investigation business for his uncanny ability to find the point of origin and the charred remains of the firestarting device.
The reason for his divining ability was that he was not just an arson investigator, but a mass-scale arsonist who started at least four score fires, and may well have started one thousand or more (the number of brush fires in Glendale the year after he was arrested dropped from something like 67 to 5).
The bastard set fire to quite a few stores where my mom shopped. He’d dropped a delayed-ignition device in the middle of the most flammable merchandise and stroll out, get in his Glendale Fire Department car, drive away, then, when the smoke was rising, ostensibly notice it, drive back and videotape the fire from across the street.
He was convicted in the arson murder of four people in a home improvement center in South Pasadena largely based on his novel/diary Point of Origins, he was writing about an arsonist (which was eventually made into an HBO movie with Ray Liotta).
The defining event of Orr’s life had been that he had applied to be a Los Angeles Police Department officer when it was at the height of its reputation as the most professional department in the country in 1970, and been turned down as “psychologically unstable.”
He then became a fireman because he needed a job, but the psychological rewards of being a fireman (as Wambaugh, who served in the LAPD from 1960-1974, says: “everybody loves a fireman”) didn’t fulfill him. He always told people he didn’t want to be a cop, but he gravitated toward the most cop-like job in the fire business, arson investigator, and loved engaging in cop-like stunts like high speed chases and intimidating interrogations. (Presumably, cop turned novelist Wambaugh found Orr, the quasi-cop turned novelist/criminal, intriguing in a sort of evil twin way).
Eventually, Orr acted out his need for dominance by terrorizing people with fire.
Have you not been paying attention these last 8 years? The FBI is not there to solve crimes. It is there to be a secret police force. It is the KGB. It doesn't care at all about stopping crimes, including arson.
This suggestion has the same problem as the much more common one that we should screen boys for whether we think they'll commit a mass shooting - the problem is too rare for screening to help.
With 100 arsonists among 1,000,000 firemen, a test that detects all arsonists and falsely flags 5% of innocents will catch about 500 innocent firemen for each arsonist.
Or, a test that detects half of arsonists and only flags 0.5% of innocents will catch "only" 100 innocent firemen for every arsonist.
We don't have to arrest them all. When I had a DoD security clearance in the 80s, they knew to look for sudden wealth, high debts, and risky lifestyle choices, as we were required to read about recent security arrests. The hard part was getting someone powerful to act on adverse information, as we see with mass shooters and Trump assassins today.
Backdraft, despite being a big budget movie with lots of names above the title types, didn't make much cultural impact. I can't think of a single person who's ever referenced it or quoted it or cited it.
Maybe it’s because they’re natural firebugs or maybe it’s because they resemble the cobbler in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ who whips up an angry mob and leads it around Rome so as to wear out the mob’s soles and thereby procure himself more work.
Steve, I'm sure you've noticed that guys also tend to enjoy firetrucks and sirens. Always a thrill to see one racing down the street with the siren going full blast! woo wooo!!
There was woman who was a forestry employee Colorado who started the largest blaze in state history when burning a letter from her estranged husband. She reported the fire to be a hero. I was a pyromaniac as a child nearly starting several conflagrations. I took a fire science class at a technical high school learning to be a firefighter. I was dissuaded by my firefighter cousin who explained it would mostly just be pulling dead bodies out of car accidents instead.
NY Times considerably better than most all other newspapers? I suppose so if the story is on a topic with no obvious political implications, in which case it is tendentious junk.
Being a firefighter is boring 95% of the time - long, long stretches of doing nothing punctuated by a bit of training is mostly what they do. Although there are undoubtedly some pyros attracted to it, I wonder how many of firefighter arsonists are simply bored and want some action and/or an opportunity to be a hero.
Normally I would think the more adventure-seeking firefighters would volunteer to be smokejumpers for the fire season it the mountain states as a healthy way to do something a bit dangerous and heroic, but perhaps there are not enough opportunities out there.
Comedian Whitney Cummings has told the story several times about how she was doing animal rescue in California fires and she spoke to a fireman. He told her the dirty little secret that all the fires were set by homeless people. Obviously "all" is exaggeration, but his claim was that this fact is hidden from the public for fear of turning them against the homeless.
Here in Valley you can see burn marks on the walls of underpasses where the unhoused used to camp. BTW, despite the current mayor's rhetoric, I have seen a dramatic drop in these encampments around my neighborhood since the end of the pandemic
The 1993 Old Topanga fire that destroyed a lot of Malibu was started by homeless campers. I saw it in its incipient stage driving to Pasadena from Orange County for a business presentation. By the time the meeting was over the air was full of smoke. Not many days afterward I was in Malibu with a client company that was rebuilding the telephone system behind the fire.
Lighting fires, wetting the bed, and torturing animals are the serial killer trifecta in children. In other words, if you find a kid who's a pyro, who wets the bed long past the age of diapers, and you find a mini pet cemetery from him, get him locked up immediately, because odds are very good he's a mini Jeffrey Dahmer.
As of the most recent data, there are approximately 1.04 million firefighters in the United States. About 33% (roughly 346,000) of them are career firefighters, while the majority—around 67% (about 696,000)—are volunteer firefighters. These figures come from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), which regularly surveys fire departments across the country.
I believe the firefighter community refers to this hunting or making work. It's a well known but thankfully not super common problem. It is the traditional justification for paying fire crews so poorly by government agencies, although some might say that practice actually contributes to arson by firefighters.
".... motives varied, from those who wanted to be a hero by putting out their own blazes to others who wanted more firefighting action or suffered from psychological disorders."
It's not just psychological. Some are motivated by money, especially in the federal government, where cross-agency (Forest Service, Land Management, Fish and Wildlife, Indian Affairs, etc.) teams are assembled to respond to incidents. These teams consist of plenty of people who are not full-time firefighters. They get stipends like hazard pay and per diem when they go to a fire site.
> more than 100 firefighters in the United States were arrested each year on arson charges
While I knew this was a thing, if I had to guess before reading this article, I probably would have said it was a dozen or so per year. That it's in the triple digits is quite disturbing.
As an aside, this is why Richard Jewell was incorrectly pegged as the suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing; he was a loser who did something heroic, so the authorities and media rushed to judgement. Sadly for everyone in this case, Jewell was a legitimate hero in this instance. Imagine having your life ruined at 33; truly no good deed goes unpunished.
> "That it's in the triple digits is quite disturbing."
How many firefighters are in the US?
> "Imagine having your life ruined at 33"
Christians, reply!
I remember when Jewell’s home was searched by law enforcement. A network reporter, whom I understood was from NYC, looked into the camera and intoned that law enforcement had discovered nails and duct tape in Jewell’s garage.
I remember thinking, “You elitist snob. If you weren’t an East Coast weenie living in an apartment, you would know that nails and duct tape could be found in 99% of the garages in America.”
Eastwood’s movie about Jewell was excellent.
A funny story that emerged out of the movie was that actress/feminazi Olivia Wilde played a slut reporter who was happily hopping on an FBI agent's crotch for information and is the key accuser of Jewell at first, ruining his reputation. Female reporters and feminists complained about this portrayal, even though its an open secret that this is how most female reporters get their scoops. (e.g. the recent blowup with slut Olivia Nuzzi polishing RFK Jr.'s fishing tackle).
Wilde came out after the movie and lamented its portrayal of her character as a career-driven, easy slut willing to lie to harm a man's reputation. That's right, she was taking shots at Eastwood and at a film she'd been given a plum role in. All for feminism.
Wilde is the privileged daughter of internationally-famous and wealthy journalists. A good-looking girl when young, she decided that portraying a smug bisexual slut mud shark on House who acted like a bitch all the time was a good career move. Shockingly (/s), she never was able to parlay that into being a major star (although she was given major roles in big budget movies, likely for casting couch gifts), and so has tried her hand at directing making, *sigh*, two feminist movies: a coming-of-age teenage movie and a horror/thriller movie. The movies received feminist critical acclaim but no audiences watched them because they're bad Message Movies. (The horror/thriller movie has a distinction of being one where she claimed that she fired Shia LeBouf and LeBouf claimed he quit and backed this up by releasing a voicemail from Wilde begging him to come back/not quit, thus proving Wilde a liar).
My guess is Wilde was selected by Eastwood as a conniving career-driven slut feminazi willing to lie to help her own interests because of typecasting. Her post-film reaction only solidifies Eastwood's choice.
There's a reason she was Thirteen.
> How many firefighters are in the US?
Your computer doesn't have Google? 🤔
Sure, but if you Google it (you did Google it, right?) you quickly see that the chosen definition of "firefighter" will massively swing the results, by as much as several hundred percent.
So why bother asking me?
Both statements in my comment were rhetorical, but if one wants to count firefighters anyway, one has to explain the chosen criteria.
> That it's in the triple digits is quite disturbing.
We seem to have an estimated one million firefighters as of 2020, so this is about 0.01% of firefighters.
So, 1 in 10,000. But if you narrow "firefighters" to only career firefighters, from whose ranks firebugs may be disproportionately drawn, then the number is more like 1 in 3000, which means that if your town has, say, 1000 firefighters, there is a 1 in 3 chance that someone on the force is setting more fires than the force is extinguishing, which is not too reassuring.
Then consider that the 100 or so numerator represents only the ones who get caught and prosecuted. If the number who are undetected or un-arrested and covered up to avoid a scandal are similar to the convicted number, then ... uh-oh: any large town firefighting force might be harboring a secret firebug.
The FBI should be studying what personality quirks and histories to screen for and what triggering events get them started. Maybe someone has, and they're too close to what makes a good fireman. Or as Tolstoy wrote, "each pyro is a pyro in his own way."
In 2009, I wrote:
By the way, speaking of need for dominance, last week, I read Joseph Wambaugh’s true crime book Fire Lover about John Orr, the veteran Glendale (California) Fire Department arson investigator. He became a legend in the arson investigation business for his uncanny ability to find the point of origin and the charred remains of the firestarting device.
The reason for his divining ability was that he was not just an arson investigator, but a mass-scale arsonist who started at least four score fires, and may well have started one thousand or more (the number of brush fires in Glendale the year after he was arrested dropped from something like 67 to 5).
The bastard set fire to quite a few stores where my mom shopped. He’d dropped a delayed-ignition device in the middle of the most flammable merchandise and stroll out, get in his Glendale Fire Department car, drive away, then, when the smoke was rising, ostensibly notice it, drive back and videotape the fire from across the street.
He was convicted in the arson murder of four people in a home improvement center in South Pasadena largely based on his novel/diary Point of Origins, he was writing about an arsonist (which was eventually made into an HBO movie with Ray Liotta).
The defining event of Orr’s life had been that he had applied to be a Los Angeles Police Department officer when it was at the height of its reputation as the most professional department in the country in 1970, and been turned down as “psychologically unstable.”
He then became a fireman because he needed a job, but the psychological rewards of being a fireman (as Wambaugh, who served in the LAPD from 1960-1974, says: “everybody loves a fireman”) didn’t fulfill him. He always told people he didn’t want to be a cop, but he gravitated toward the most cop-like job in the fire business, arson investigator, and loved engaging in cop-like stunts like high speed chases and intimidating interrogations. (Presumably, cop turned novelist Wambaugh found Orr, the quasi-cop turned novelist/criminal, intriguing in a sort of evil twin way).
Eventually, Orr acted out his need for dominance by terrorizing people with fire.
“everybody loves a fireman”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QgctZDpHSQ
Have you not been paying attention these last 8 years? The FBI is not there to solve crimes. It is there to be a secret police force. It is the KGB. It doesn't care at all about stopping crimes, including arson.
This suggestion has the same problem as the much more common one that we should screen boys for whether we think they'll commit a mass shooting - the problem is too rare for screening to help.
With 100 arsonists among 1,000,000 firemen, a test that detects all arsonists and falsely flags 5% of innocents will catch about 500 innocent firemen for each arsonist.
Or, a test that detects half of arsonists and only flags 0.5% of innocents will catch "only" 100 innocent firemen for every arsonist.
We don't have to arrest them all. When I had a DoD security clearance in the 80s, they knew to look for sudden wealth, high debts, and risky lifestyle choices, as we were required to read about recent security arrests. The hard part was getting someone powerful to act on adverse information, as we see with mass shooters and Trump assassins today.
IIRC, isn't the perp in the movie 'Backdratft' an uncannily effective fireman as well?
That movie is from way back, and should be pretty well known, so the trope of the arsonist-fireman is out there in the conventional wisdom.
Backdraft, despite being a big budget movie with lots of names above the title types, didn't make much cultural impact. I can't think of a single person who's ever referenced it or quoted it or cited it.
Maybe it’s because they’re natural firebugs or maybe it’s because they resemble the cobbler in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ who whips up an angry mob and leads it around Rome so as to wear out the mob’s soles and thereby procure himself more work.
There's an analogy for politicians in here somewhere, isn't there?
Steve, I'm sure you've noticed that guys also tend to enjoy firetrucks and sirens. Always a thrill to see one racing down the street with the siren going full blast! woo wooo!!
There was woman who was a forestry employee Colorado who started the largest blaze in state history when burning a letter from her estranged husband. She reported the fire to be a hero. I was a pyromaniac as a child nearly starting several conflagrations. I took a fire science class at a technical high school learning to be a firefighter. I was dissuaded by my firefighter cousin who explained it would mostly just be pulling dead bodies out of car accidents instead.
NY Times considerably better than most all other newspapers? I suppose so if the story is on a topic with no obvious political implications, in which case it is tendentious junk.
Or, as Steve points out, it ignores the politically inconvenient story altogether.
Being a firefighter is boring 95% of the time - long, long stretches of doing nothing punctuated by a bit of training is mostly what they do. Although there are undoubtedly some pyros attracted to it, I wonder how many of firefighter arsonists are simply bored and want some action and/or an opportunity to be a hero.
Normally I would think the more adventure-seeking firefighters would volunteer to be smokejumpers for the fire season it the mountain states as a healthy way to do something a bit dangerous and heroic, but perhaps there are not enough opportunities out there.
I recall reading in the WSJ when I still read newspapers that on average past 50 years fires have declined 40% and fire departments have expanded 25%.
Comedian Whitney Cummings has told the story several times about how she was doing animal rescue in California fires and she spoke to a fireman. He told her the dirty little secret that all the fires were set by homeless people. Obviously "all" is exaggeration, but his claim was that this fact is hidden from the public for fear of turning them against the homeless.
Here in Valley you can see burn marks on the walls of underpasses where the unhoused used to camp. BTW, despite the current mayor's rhetoric, I have seen a dramatic drop in these encampments around my neighborhood since the end of the pandemic
The 1993 Old Topanga fire that destroyed a lot of Malibu was started by homeless campers. I saw it in its incipient stage driving to Pasadena from Orange County for a business presentation. By the time the meeting was over the air was full of smoke. Not many days afterward I was in Malibu with a client company that was rebuilding the telephone system behind the fire.
Lighting fires, wetting the bed, and torturing animals are the serial killer trifecta in children. In other words, if you find a kid who's a pyro, who wets the bed long past the age of diapers, and you find a mini pet cemetery from him, get him locked up immediately, because odds are very good he's a mini Jeffrey Dahmer.
As of the most recent data, there are approximately 1.04 million firefighters in the United States. About 33% (roughly 346,000) of them are career firefighters, while the majority—around 67% (about 696,000)—are volunteer firefighters. These figures come from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), which regularly surveys fire departments across the country.
I believe the firefighter community refers to this hunting or making work. It's a well known but thankfully not super common problem. It is the traditional justification for paying fire crews so poorly by government agencies, although some might say that practice actually contributes to arson by firefighters.
".... motives varied, from those who wanted to be a hero by putting out their own blazes to others who wanted more firefighting action or suffered from psychological disorders."
It's not just psychological. Some are motivated by money, especially in the federal government, where cross-agency (Forest Service, Land Management, Fish and Wildlife, Indian Affairs, etc.) teams are assembled to respond to incidents. These teams consist of plenty of people who are not full-time firefighters. They get stipends like hazard pay and per diem when they go to a fire site.
Speaking of occupational stereotypes, the number of Postal employees going Postal seems to have collapsed.