Word: arsons
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...firemen used every available piece of equipment, including the city's sole fire boat. Charlestown's Engine 50 spent one Saturday night rushing to multiple-alarmers, first two miles to South Boston, then four miles from there to Jamaica Plain, then finally back to Charles town. As for the arson investigators. "We're getting there after the fact." McCarthy admits. "Two or three alarms have gone off by the time the arson squad gets there." In such cases most of any evidence of arson is burned, and very few arrests can be made--only 10 all this summer...
Since early June, usually on Friday mornings or Friday or Saturday nights, about 200 "suspicious" fires have occurred in Boston. McCarthy has the luck to heard the arson squad in a city where a third of all fires are arson-related, and where the fire department is by far the most overworked in the country. One firemen's union official found that to overworked in the country. One firemen's union official found that to bring the force up to the national average of total runs and multiple alarms per engine, the city would have to reopen the 21 stations...
...shocked as Bostonians may be at the epidemic of torching, they should final its caused even more troubling. If it were just the word of a few firebugs or linked to a general increase in crime, one would expect the arson to have centered on the city's most crime-ridden area, Roxbury--especially on hearing that vacant buildings, a common commodity there, were the targets of 70 percent of the fires. (The figures is the main reason the arson took no lives...
...person," she says, "I don't have no sympathy for that." Some states have already been pressed by high volume toward a strategy of reserving prisons for the most violent. More than 70% of the inmates in Illinois and New York are doing time for homicide, kidnaping, rape, arson, robbery, assault or weapons possession. Nationally, however, just over half of all prisoners are locked up for such crimes, and in Georgia, for instance, the overwhelming majority of prisoners are serving time for non-violent crimes. The rest are not angels with dirty faces but crooks, to be sure?thieves, mostly?...
...ballooning housing costs do not drive out longtime residents, the arson epidemic may. Almost two buildings are being torched a night, on average, and one in five Boston fires is set deliberately, twice the 1979 rate. Since June 11, when 101 fires were reported in twelve hours, arsonists have caused $5 million in damage. Jim Coakley is one of 16 firemen on a special roving arson squad that includes police and federal agents. "It could be anything," he says. "Profit, vandalism, imitation... Some of it is because kids decide to set a fire and get some excitement...