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
As a professional fire performer and fuel tech, you have no idea how many times people jokingly accuse me of arson. Like please, I’m not a novice, the guys set themselves on fire half the time. The state has my fingerprints anyways.
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.
translated paragraph from https://www.nzz.ch/gesellschaft/loeschen-was-der-kollege-angezuendet-hat-ld.1815687
It’s a trope that people jack off to fire?
There are quite a few high profile (in the media anyhow) cases where nutjobs get off on starting fires, yeah. But the really dark shit starts to happen when (ahem) alternative media sources start to imply that all arsonists are paid state actors and/or sexually aroused political players doing all the arson.
It’s usually insurance-related. Or accidental. Nothing that sexy in the vast majority of them.
My favorite was last year during the very real wildfire issues affecting western canada where the flat-earthers kept posting video of actual forestry worker helicopters torching brush piles (something they actually do, during the off-season, to clean up tinder piles) and conflating it with “treaudeauh-paid ANTIFA super-soldiers out to bring in 15 minute cities and permanent state control by burning society to the ground” or whatever the hell. The absurdity of it all kinda turned me on in the other direction, ngl.
Here in California they just keep blaming the super-secret Jewish space laser for starting all the fires. But it doesn’t burn things that are blue, which is why so many people have blue roofs in China.
i thought the cliche was insurance fraud? ive never heard of the relief part, where are you seeing it?
The trope I’m familiar with is that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime to enjoy watching the aftermath and/or observe who is investigating. There’s also a trope about serial killers exhibiting a creepy triad of behaviors in childhood: bed wetting, arson, and animal torture. I’m not an expert but I think the science is dubious.
Movies and TV shows have used these tropes and countless variations. Are you maybe remembering one where the arsonist liked to have a wank? It would not surprise me if it was used in one or more procedural crime dramas. If it’s a common trope, it’s news to me!
When I was younger I used to work at a liquor store with a firefighter. I asked him about arsonists since we had 3 whole trailer parks go up in flames. He told me they always had someone in their civis and would wonder thru the crowds or people parked nearby. He said there were a couple of fires where they caught the guy because I quoting here that he would jerk off to his fires. But one time I guess he did the fire wrong and burnt the shit out of hit nether regions and when he went to the hospital they reported it.
Too many innocents go to jail behind false arson accusations. You never know if the building was into it at the time, but then felt ashamed later and cried arson. And then it’s just your word against the fire investigators. Just the accusation can destroy your reputation, no trial or nothing.
With the first sentence I thought you were going to talk about the very real abundance of bias and unreliability in arson investigation and other forms of forensic science.
https://www.science.org/content/article/forensic-experts-biased-scientists-claims-spark-outrage
