BY BILL MANNING
It’s a crime that horribly maims, scars, and kills thousands each year. It’s a crime that exacts on children and adults the worst physical pain on this earth.
Each year, more than 500,000 unspeakable acts of arson are committed in the United States. It is time to speak out.
I recently traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to deliver a presentation for the International Association of Arson Investigators. I spent a few moments observing the gamblers hunched over slot machines and blackjack tables, all hoping for the big hit.
It occurred to me that for each and every one of those hopefuls, their odds of making the big hit were much less than their chances of somehow being touched by an arson fire. I realized their kids in campus dorms and frat houses have a better chance of being exposed to an arson fire than they do of winning at the roulette wheel. That their neighborhoods stood a better chance of being blighted by arson than they had of winning some $843 million jackpot.
If the casinos operated on a similar odds structure as we spin the arson wheel, they’d be out of business in no time.
The business of arson prevention and investigation isn’t very sexy. Like most people, I’m thinking more about the big red trucks than half a million arson fires and juvenile firesetters and vacant structures and kids in burn wards, their little lives destroyed.
Thirty percent of all fires go undetermined. Only 17 percent of arson fires are solved by arrest, and a mere two percent of arson offenses lead to conviction. If this society treated other homicides and felonies the same way, we’d be in big trouble.
The public in general and our elected officials are not dialed in to the arson problem in America. We’ve got a big arson prevention marketing problem.
Even for the majority of the fire service, the fire investigator is like some on-the-fringes geek, some version of Sherlock Holmes, with a trench coat and a magnifying glass and sometimes a gun, who shows up after all the really fun, hard, manly work is done.
It’s a marketing problem.
I never thought enough about arson being by far the leading cause of all fires. That it’s the second leading cause of civilian fire deaths and civilian fire injuries. That it’s by far the leading cause of dollar losses from all fires-almost 30 percent.
These are statistics our public and our public officials aren’t thinking about, either.
Our public and our elected officials don’t think much about the fact that even though fires in the United States have decreased over a 20-year period, arson fires have fallen at a much lesser rate, meaning that in 2001, arson takes up a larger piece of our truly significant and truly disgraceful national fire pie.
We must overcome the public’s casual attitude toward fire, the culture of indifference that says that fire is just part of American life.
We must overcome the culture of complacency that speaks to us inside, saying, “It can’t happen to me.” It can happen to me, at greater odds than my spinning three lemons in a row. We must overcome the crust people build up on themselves over the fact that we’re dying in ones and twos and threes and suffering thousands of insufferable, unspeakable burn injuries that make the local news one night, then are forgotten.
We must overcome the ignorance factor, our educational deficiencies with regard to arson awareness and arson programs, or the lack thereof.
We must overcome the huge challenge of enacting forward-thinking intervention strategies into the daily curricula of fire and emergency services. It’s time to explode the myth that minimizing the arson problem means firefighters will lose their jobs-we won’t, if we’re smart and seek to become part of the solution.
We must expose the romantic image within the fire service, spoken in small groups and behind closed doors, that, for us, unfriendly fire is “a good thing” because it gets our adrenaline pumping, gets us out in the big red trucks, allows us to showcase our toughness and courage, and allows us to do good. There is no romance in a child’s being burned. There is no romance in a child losing his father to an arson fire in a vacant building.
To overcome the challenges, we must market, market, and market arson prevention. We must hit home with the public and our elected officials with images and words that sear with pain and tear at conscience. We must hit them in the gut, where it hurts.
We must market from the perspective of the children. Juvenile firesetting is on the rise, despite the overall drop in the number of total fires. If one-third of all arson arrests are of kids under the age of 15, well, damn it, market arson as a “kid disease” and a “parent disease.” Say, “Yes, Mr. Politician, we are the fire service, and we are all about saving our kids.”
We have to market from the perspective of eradicating the drug wars in our cities and suburbs. Arson is in part a byproduct of the drug culture and the failed social policy known as the “War on Drugs.” Illegalization of drugs has turned the market over to thugs with assault weapons and arson among their arsenal of violence. Legalize and control drugs, and we’ll take back the Wild West streets and, to the point, eliminate almost 20 percent of the arson problem in America.
And we must market from the perspective of commitment to eradicating our huge vacant structure problem in this country. A recent five-year study indicates the 60,000 vacant building fires in that period sorely underestimates the problem. Seventy percent of all those fires were arson related. Child-set fires in vacant buildings are double that in any other type of structure. More vacant structures means more kids exposed, therefore more firefighters are exposed because the firefighter cannot assume the building is unoccupied. Firefighters are five times more likely to be injured in a vacant building fire than in any other type of structure fire. Haven’t we learned anything from Worcester?
Attacking juvenile firesetting, drug-related arsons, and vacant buildings will have a huge, huge positive effect on our communities and the overall national fire problem.
Surely it is time to thrust ourselves into the political marketing strategies that will serve as the groundwork in eradicating the unspeakable crime of arson that exacts such an unspeakable toll on our society.
