Has it ever been proven that arsonists stick around for their fires? Or give themselves relief while watching them? Or is it just a trope?

"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.

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

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.

Also, what's that relief from?

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.

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

I mean, did you see the siding on that house? It was totally asking for it.