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.

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’m curious what other professions have analogous issues.

Police who seed crime? (Surely.)

Developers who insert bugs?

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 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.

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?

> 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.

> 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”