Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Aurornis 22 hours ago
I looked it up: About a million firefighters in the US, including volunteer firefighters.

Having 1 in 10,000 of them convicted of arson each year is a wild statistic.

2 comments

Your stats sent me into sobering-thoughts-mode...

More sobering thought: conviction rates are typically a small percentage of the people who do the foul deed. The definition of "arsonist", for example. What if someone started "just one" fire?

A more sobering thought: of the total fires fought each year, how many are started by those rogue firefighters?

A most sobering thought: why is it that there is so much fallow time, that they get bored?

This is the fact that’s literally a .0001% chance
Your math is wrong for two reasons.

You forgot to multiply by 100.

You forgot to multiply by the number of firefighters around you. There is more than one firefighter working in your city or state.

.01%