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.
> it’s probably a smaller percentage vs. doctors doing un-doctor things
There's roughly 200 doctors convicted every year in the U.S. alone of criminal 'patient abuse or neglect', for data compiled between 1988 and 2026 [1]. While I'd prefer to cite the 'patient abuse' figure since 'patient harmer' is the most equivalent behavior to 'firefighter arsonist' (both cause the problem they treat), I think it's worth remembering that human beings — regardless of their profession — have a slim but non-zero chance of deciding to create problems that give them professional satisfaction to solve.
My poor wording, sorry! Homelabs are a successful way to reduce 'I'm bored' crimes. I meant that, in any profession, creating a problem (self-quote) 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'.
(This could be nitpicked somewhat around not having added wording for e.g. 'test labs', 'staging', etc. The core issue equivalence is the criminal intent, not the simple fact that a problem is created.)
Fire fighters are probably the only profession that is deliberately and successfully under employed.
It's as it should be: fires are fairly random, so if firefighters are always busy fighting fires, then they aren't available if another fire breaks out.
I believe the calculation is that fire fighters should only be fighting fires 10% of the time to ensure that there are almost always fighters available.
Lots of other professions should not be always busy for the same reason: doctors, nurses, police, secretaries etc. The main reason why quarantines were continued so long in my country is because hospitals were at 110% before COVID and COVID was causing significant nurse burnout.
That deliberate idling of fire fighters might explain why they are more likely to create work for themselves than doctors or SRE's
I 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
Despite which there's a steady trickle of paediatricians (doctors specialising in child care) being rumbled for various forms of child related sexual activity.
It'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:
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.
Funding research to create a deadly virus and becoming the nations head of the taskforce in fighting that virus and associated with the companies that made fortunes using a recently created poorly tested vaccine technology on the world to fight the virus.
Seems like a set of people that suddenly made themselves really useful.
...
You can also look at lots of events that trigger wars where the side looking to get into the war seems to have a very convenient tragic even to validate their entry into a war.
Or situations where people make other dependent on them so they can constantly save them from not being able to be independent.
Or people who like to pick fights try to make it so someone will do something that will unwittingly offend them.
The world is full of setups, many subconsciously created, so that one person can be the hero or main character in their own narrative.
Heck we even do it to ourselves when we procrastinate so much that we have to save ourselves with Herculean effort to get something done on time.
Why will developers insert bugs and make their own work harder? there is no extra recognition there, which is primarily a reason why they are doing it. But if you are regularly shipping bugs because you feel good at then fixing it and expect people to appreciate you for it, how long do you think that dev will last at a role?
Don’t think logically, think like a narcissist: If you plant that bug, you exactly know
how to fix it. The more damage it causes, the higher the admiration if you fix it. HOWEVER, for that to work you'd need to blame someone else and gaslight everyone into believing your story. That makes it a tad more difficult, but I think it’s still doable.
Creating 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.)
For 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
You comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists. That’s the wrong comparison. You should be comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/firefighters. Or firefighters/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists.
(On top of that, mixing numbers from different sources can be problematic. For example, how are repeat convictions treated in the different sources? Who counts as a firefighter?)
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.
> 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.
Trying to imagine being really into math and seeing one number that’s fifteen times bigger than another number and posting “that’s slightly higher”
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.
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".
> “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.
Excellent 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.
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.
> it’s probably a smaller percentage vs. doctors doing un-doctor things
There's roughly 200 doctors convicted every year in the U.S. alone of criminal 'patient abuse or neglect', for data compiled between 1988 and 2026 [1]. While I'd prefer to cite the 'patient abuse' figure since 'patient harmer' is the most equivalent behavior to 'firefighter arsonist' (both cause the problem they treat), I think it's worth remembering that human beings — regardless of their profession — have a slim but non-zero chance of deciding to create problems that give them professional satisfaction to solve.
[1] https://plaindiscipline.com/action-type/conviction-patient-a... —
> have a slim but non-zero chance of deciding to create problems that give them professional satisfaction to solve.
Ahh right, my homelab.
My poor wording, sorry! Homelabs are a successful way to reduce 'I'm bored' crimes. I meant that, in any profession, creating a problem (self-quote) 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'.
(This could be nitpicked somewhat around not having added wording for e.g. 'test labs', 'staging', etc. The core issue equivalence is the criminal intent, not the simple fact that a problem is created.)
This made me actually lol. I feel your pain!
Fire fighters are probably the only profession that is deliberately and successfully under employed.
It's as it should be: fires are fairly random, so if firefighters are always busy fighting fires, then they aren't available if another fire breaks out.
I believe the calculation is that fire fighters should only be fighting fires 10% of the time to ensure that there are almost always fighters available.
Lots of other professions should not be always busy for the same reason: doctors, nurses, police, secretaries etc. The main reason why quarantines were continued so long in my country is because hospitals were at 110% before COVID and COVID was causing significant nurse burnout.
That deliberate idling of fire fighters might explain why they are more likely to create work for themselves than doctors or SRE's
This may also be subject to survivorship bias, and there may be a portion of firefighter arsonists who escape prosecution or conviction
How is that any different than any other profession?
> all of them are serial arsonists, which means three or more fires
So, the number '100', has to wildly low, as some arsonists will not have been caught, or only started one or two fires.
I 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
Despite 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-c...
Pedo is not the opposite of doctor though, is it?
It'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-...
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.
> 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-...
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
I’m curious what other professions have analogous issues.
Police who seed crime? (Surely.)
Developers who insert bugs?
20y ago in Poland there was a huge story where the ER responders were killing people to sell hints to a funeral house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_Hunters
Maybe politicians. They try to stage violent attacks against themselves and then accuse other parties for their own political gain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
Cybersecurity researchers who let loose worms or ransomware?
Car mechanics who break things so you come back for more business?
Airline pilots who... hijack their own flight?... Hm
Tire dealers that go around puncturing tires has been a urban legend for decades
That would be an expensive way to drum up business.
Expensive to just buy a box of suitable nails and just sprinkle them around while they're already driving places?
... And then drive under the threat that their own tires will get punctured as well.
> Developers who insert bugs
I knew it was the developers!
Garbageman comes to mind
Funding research to create a deadly virus and becoming the nations head of the taskforce in fighting that virus and associated with the companies that made fortunes using a recently created poorly tested vaccine technology on the world to fight the virus.
Seems like a set of people that suddenly made themselves really useful.
...
You can also look at lots of events that trigger wars where the side looking to get into the war seems to have a very convenient tragic even to validate their entry into a war.
Or situations where people make other dependent on them so they can constantly save them from not being able to be independent.
Or people who like to pick fights try to make it so someone will do something that will unwittingly offend them.
The world is full of setups, many subconsciously created, so that one person can be the hero or main character in their own narrative.
Heck we even do it to ourselves when we procrastinate so much that we have to save ourselves with Herculean effort to get something done on time.
There 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
Why will developers insert bugs and make their own work harder? there is no extra recognition there, which is primarily a reason why they are doing it. But if you are regularly shipping bugs because you feel good at then fixing it and expect people to appreciate you for it, how long do you think that dev will last at a role?
Don’t think logically, think like a narcissist: If you plant that bug, you exactly know how to fix it. The more damage it causes, the higher the admiration if you fix it. HOWEVER, for that to work you'd need to blame someone else and gaslight everyone into believing your story. That makes it a tad more difficult, but I think it’s still doable.
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.
Creating 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.)
You're secretly a robot.
Secretly?
For 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.
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.
Your 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?
This is the fact that’s literally a .0001% chance
.01%
This reminds me of the movie Backdraft, about firefighters and a mysterious arsonist.
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.
> 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.
You comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists. That’s the wrong comparison. You should be comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/firefighters. Or firefighters/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists.
(On top of that, mixing numbers from different sources can be problematic. For example, how are repeat convictions treated in the different sources? Who counts as a firefighter?)
This 'article' (its a blog post if anything) is based on this this CBC article.
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.
Matt Hinds-Aldrich NVFC papers:
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_Cou...
Firefighter Arson Prevention & Recovery Toolkit - NVFC
~ https://www.academia.edu/3258256/Firefighter_Arson_Preventio...
> 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.
Trying to imagine being really into math and seeing one number that’s fifteen times bigger than another number and posting “that’s slightly higher”
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
Computer viruses. Anti-virus companies making viruses happens to be one of my favourite conspiracy theories.
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".
> “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.
Excellent 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.
Now do the stats on police and domestic violence.
[flagged]
Isn't half of Canada on fire right now?