Virginia Arson

About this data

• Counts are arson offenses (fires), not arrests. Each figure is a fire that a law-enforcement agency determined or suspected was intentionally set. Arson arrests are a different, much smaller number — most arsons are never cleared — and are tracked separately in our Arrests dataset.
• The figures are de-duplicated across the FBI's two overlapping reporting streams — the legacy SRS summary system and NIBRS incident data. Most agencies appear in both, so naively summing the two streams, as some published totals do, roughly doubles the count. Each agency here is counted once, from its best available stream.
• Reported agencies only. The total covers agencies in the FBI's 2024 master files — about 96% of the FBI's own de-duplicated figure of 36,558, which comes from its live database and includes some later-arriving reports. Nothing here is estimated, so totals slightly undercount and are not strictly comparable across areas with different reporting coverage.
• Location is the reporting agency's headquarters county, not where the fire happened. Multi-jurisdiction agencies concentrate in one county — every NYPD-reported arson lands in New York County, for example — and county figures cover geolocated agencies only, so they sum to slightly less than the national total.
• Zero and missing mean different things. A zero means agencies in that county reported to the FBI and logged no arson; a county with no figure at all had no reporting agency headquartered there.

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, 2024 SRS and NIBRS files, de-duplicated by agency. pumsdata is independent and not affiliated with the FBI. How our data works.