January/February 2008

NFPA Journal® online exclusive,    February 2008

By John R. Hall, Jr., Ph.D.,adapted and revised from Hall, Intentional Fires and Arson  (PDF, 246 KB) , NFPA, November 2007

• The trend in intentional fires reported to fire departments has been fairly consistently down, from 1980 to 2005 (the latest year for which statistics are available).  There have been periods where the trend was level, but no periods with a sustained upward trend and no notable increases in years with recessions or other economic shocks.

The recent wave of home mortgage foreclosures has raised a new variation of the recurring question of whether there is a link between arson and trends in the economy, particularly recessions.  In hard times, it is not unusual for local fire officials and insurance adjusters in some communities to report apparent jumps in some types of arson. 

People have argued that recessions would be associated with increased numbers of intentional structure fires or intentional fires generally or losses associated with those fires.  People have also argued that oil price shocks would be associated with increased numbers of intentional vehicle fires or losses associated with those fires, as owners attempted to get out from under vehicles they could no longer afford to operate. 

Since 1980, recessions have dominated four years (1980, 1982, 1990, and 2001).  The recessions in 1980 and 1982 have been linked to oil price shocks in 1979.  The recession in 1990 has been linked to oil price shocks in the same year.  The recession in 2001 has been linked to oil price shocks in 2000.  See the two attached tables with structure, vehicle, other and total intentional fires for all currently available years (1980-2005) and for direct property damage in those fires.

• Recession year of 1982:   Intentional fires, total and structures only, both declined substantially, as did direct property damage in inflation-adjusted dollars.  There were further declines in 1983.  There was no period around 1982 when national arson numbers appeared to go up substantially.
  
• Recession and oil-price shock year of 1990:  Intentional fires in structures decreased, while vehicle and total intentional fires increased.  Neither the decreases nor the increases were noticeably larger than the normal year-to-year variation around the long-term trend - which was fairly flat in the years just before and just after 1990.  Direct property damage in inflation-adjusted dollars for intentional fires also showed a mix of increases and decreases that did not stand out from the normal year-to-year variation.
  
• Oil-price shock year of 2000 and associated recession year of 2001.  Vehicle intentional fires declined during the oil-price shock year of 2000, though as in 1990, the decline did not stand out from the normal year-to-year variation.  In the recession year of 2001, intentional fires in structures declined and total intentional fires increased.  Again, the sizes of the increases and decreases were not notable against the background of normal year-to-year variation.

None of this analysis precludes the possibility that there have been increases in arson, driven by economics, within particular communities, particular states, or particular industries.  All we can say with confidence is that any such increases have not been sufficiently dramatic and widespread to show up clearly in the national statistics.

• Profit is not a leading motive for arson, and so it would not be surprising that an increase in arson for profit, if it occurred, would be overshadowed by contrary trends in other, larger parts of the arson problem.

Each year about half of arson arrests involve juveniles.  For the half of arson that is not juvenile firesetting, past special studies have consistently shown that revenge or spite is a more common motive than arson for profit.  (Motives are not assessed routinely and are not recorded in any ongoing arson database.)  Therefore, even if there were a statistically significant jump in arson for profit, the overall arson figure might not show the jump in measureable form and might even decline, under the influence of other factors affecting other, larger parts of the arson problem, such as juvenile firesetting.

Another variation of the hypothesized link between arson rates and adverse economic conditions is that arson involving businesses would be more likely to occur at the end of the month because this might be seen as necessary to fix up an otherwise dismal balance sheet.  An analysis was done to see whether stores and offices had more incendiary and suspicious fires in the last three days of the month than at other times.  Data from 1988-92 were used, and at first the answer seemed affirmative:  Those days accounted for 10% of the days and 15% of the incendiary fires.  On closer examination, this proved to be entirely an artifact of the Los Angeles civil disturbance, which went into the records as nearly 2,000 separate incidents at the end of April 1991.  If those days are removed, the other days still account for roughly 10% of the days and now also account for roughly 10% of the fires, meaning there is no higher arson rate at the ends of months.

• Some anti-arson programs may have reduced the number of cases of arson for profit by making it less likely that such crimes would go undiscovered.

In particular, the advent of some insurance and other computerized matching database tools has been credited by some investigators with making arson for profit easier to detect and prove.