“Alright, listen fellas, the city has cut our budget as firefighters. They say the city is TOO safe, and there’s not enough fires to justify paying rent on a building with a stripper pole, and 15 men sleeping in the same room. So as of next month, our city will no longer have firefighters.”
“Well…what if we did still keep being firefighters?”
“What do you mean? There’s not enough fires to justify our budget.”
“…I have an idea. It’s a bit of a wildcard idea though.”
The crazy thing is that there’s apparently no official database that tracks that. There was just a California firefighter charged with multiple counts of arson and in the article they mention that the statistic isn’t tracked, they went on to do a database search that showed how frequent it is.
There are figures that suggest a different picture, but hardly anyone knows them. In 2013, the former Schwyz public prosecutor Lorenz Müller wrote a “behavioral analysis of serial arsonists”. Based on a survey of German-speaking Swiss cantons, he examined 19 series of fires with a total of 21 perpetrators. Of these 21, three were current and one were former firefighters - their share was therefore just under 20 percent. Müller’s conclusion: the firefighter as arsonist is not “such an unjustified cliché” after all.
There were many arsonists who were actually firefighters:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighter_arson
Those indeed came back to the scene.
“Alright, listen fellas, the city has cut our budget as firefighters. They say the city is TOO safe, and there’s not enough fires to justify paying rent on a building with a stripper pole, and 15 men sleeping in the same room. So as of next month, our city will no longer have firefighters.”
“Well…what if we did still keep being firefighters?”
“What do you mean? There’s not enough fires to justify our budget.”
“…I have an idea. It’s a bit of a wildcard idea though.”
The gang become firefighters
Isn’t this really close to the plot of Fahrenheit 451?
TIme to pull a Crassus on the city.
The crazy thing is that there’s apparently no official database that tracks that. There was just a California firefighter charged with multiple counts of arson and in the article they mention that the statistic isn’t tracked, they went on to do a database search that showed how frequent it is.
translated paragraph from https://www.nzz.ch/gesellschaft/loeschen-was-der-kollege-angezuendet-hat-ld.1815687
lieutenant! Why are you sitting around?
Sorry sir there is nothing to do.
Then make some work for yourself!
Burns down building.
Combining your article with UCR data, that’s about .3% arsons.
We have .1 arsons per 1000 ppl annually in the US. Looks like the rate for firefighters is about twice that