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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

I know of a local Volunteer fire Dept that went that way; started having the head guy and a couple of his big cousins go around and tell people how much the VFD needed support, and how flammable their house or business looked.

Couple months after that started, the guy's house burned down. I heard the trucks came out twice, the second time there were more people responding and the police got into the guy's barn with a major weed grow. Not sure what the whole story was but the VFD moved and became a different entity after that.

The moral is that neighbors enforce the character of the neighborhood. Not cops.

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Firefighter arson is a relatively well known phenomenon.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fires-set-by-firefigh...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighter_arson

Oh my goodness, that FBI behavioural profile on the second link. "We're looking for a suspect who's depressed... alcoholic... and HOMOSEXUAL"

> Oh my goodness, that FBI behavioural profile on the second link. "We're looking for a suspect who's depressed... alcoholic... and HOMOSEXUAL"

I count a total of 14 traits that they looked at[1]. Why is that one, and only that one, significant in your opinion?

[1] Including the trait of being white. And male.

"White male, age 17–25" is an entire trait. "Homosexual" is a *part* of a trait: "Alcoholism, childhood hyperactivity, homosexuality, depression, borderline personality disorder, and suicidal tendencies". It's significant because of the other descriptors it's grouped with in that trait. It would be weird to have "homosexual" as a trait on its own, but it's obviously weird to group it with these other descriptors in a single trait.

doesnt that sound like looking for [generic loser] to pin down and move onto other cases?

This report [1] is specific to "Firefighter Arson", so they're looking for things to screen for during hiring for firefighters. The section you'll be interested in is on page 20: "PREVENTION OF FIREFIGHTER ARSON". They list some actions departments have taken: background checks for arson; requiring an affidavit the applicant hasn't conducted arson; "scared straight" lectures on the consequences of being jailed; and screening firefighters with a questionnaire.

But yeah, the profiling section some sound like a way to pathologize arson. I found the motivation section and case studies more interesting. The only corroboration from the case studies is for the age; there's no evidence included for the personality traits.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190811142354/https://www.usfa....

Not much, I just thought they had taken that one out of DSM-5

That, but organized by a whole volunteer department in this case...

I'm curious, how do they actually figure out who is behind a forest fire? Or even suspect that it was a criminal act in the first place. Finding who is behind a burnt house is one thing, but a whole forest is a lot of terrain to cover for proof!

They don't need to cover the whole forest, usually the fire is first seen when still small. But it's a lot of work, I don't know how often they are successful:

https://www.nwcg.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pms412...

(I also know that forensic fire investigation for house fires/criminal investigations is basically a made up art with extremely unreliable results - not sure how much that overlaps with wildfire investigations).

I’ve always wondered, even in criminal cases, even here in France. Do they pin it on someone? Crime is prone to be pinned onto someone, it calms the populations, and it doesn’t matter whether he did it because he’s in jail, so of course he’s angry.

I personally know someone whose lawyer asked him for a large sum in cash in the 7 minutes before a trial, in the antichamber of the court.

You don't. Just grab some shlub and do some whitch doctor bullshit to convict them.

just play nice cop for an hour and people with that profile will confess JFK killing

So basically Marcus Licinus Crassus strategy for money making is still alive, 2000 years later.

what did Crassus do similarly?

>The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus

One could say he was giving the owners a chance at recovering some value rather than nothing. Also, it’s probably a more apt analogy for modern US hospitals: when you’re having say a heart attack you can’t exactly “price shop”.

But the slanted history point of view is that he started fires, so he can buy the distressed property. hospitals don't have an incentive to give you a heart attack.

Hospitals absolutely do have an incentive, what they don't have is a means of triggering one that includes plausible deniability.

Medical errors happen all the time and often are preventable with better processes. Just don't invest in reducing the error rate and boom, more business.

I‘m curious, why don’t hospitals have such an incentive? Naive conjecture would tell me otherwise.

They do have an incentive to tell you your house is on fire (I.G. prescription drugs, and the like), but they don't actively set houses on fire because they don't have 100% market capture to the patients.

You don’t need 100% market capture to profit off new customers.

litigiousness

What? There's no overlap between Crassus' strategy and the VFD's strategy as described above. The VFD asked you to pay recurring fees just in case your house ever caught fire, and when someone decided that was unlikely, they made it more likely by setting fire to his house.

Note that in this strategy, if someone's house catches fire, that's bad for the fire department, and on top of that it looks like they just committed a crime. The fire department is in the business of threatening people until they pay for a service that the fire department hopes it will never need to provide.

Crassus' strategy is completely different; he operates an actual fire department whose services are not available to other people. If your house catches fire, he'll buy it from you.

Theoretically, Crassus could benefit from arson too, but he really doesn't need it.

Crassus is in the business of buying things that have very little value to the seller (who has no way of extinguishing fires) but have a much higher value to him (because he does have a way of extinguishing fires). Unsurprisingly, this is very profitable for Crassus. But what's the similarity?

I do not know if the VFD would have or did indulge in arson. That was certainly the implication I felt when they were speaking to me. Which was amusing because I'd had to go out and take the dogs off them to let them out of the truck to talk in the first place.

I puzzled and annoyed them by confessing poverty, but offering to volunteer skilled labor. Apparently the firehouse didn't need wiring or network or anything :)

I thought someone burned down the VFD guys house in an act of vigilante justice.

I am very confused by your story. Who's house burned down? the head of the VFD?

If so, I agree that vigilante justice is one underappreciated ways that social norms are enforced.

Correct, the head of the VFD had his house burn down. The 2nd fire starting after they'd been out there once already the same night made me suspicious, but i never heard nobody brag about it.

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