Serial Arsonist At Work In Church Fires?

There's a bunch of local crime stories making the web this morning.

• Army readies Article 32 hearing for Fort Hood gunman 
• Waco teen racks up 20 charges in both Bell & McLennan counties
• Temple woman charged after stabbing
• Aryan Brotherhood members involved in Williamson County kidnapping ordeal 
• Killeen PD nabs 10 in vice sting

Serial Arsonist At Work In Church Fires?
Texas churches seem to be targeted by a serial arsonist. At least seven or eight churches, mainly in east Texas have burned at the hands of an arsonist since the beginning of the year. USA Today posted a story about this series of fires. I did some googling and came up with this list of suspicious church fires:



While most of these fires have been in east Texas, one of them happened in Temple on January 19. Just for a lark I ran the numbers on this list of events and it seems that the most common day of week for these fires are Tuesdays.



Of course, this is based on when the fires were discovered and may not have been when they were set. I have no inside information into this series but based this on what I could find by googling news stories. I also did some other temporal analysis on this series just out of curiosity but I am not going to put that out here in this forum.

However, that being said it's not unheard of for arsonists to target churches. It's even more common for other types of criminals to target churches. The buildings are only occupied for a small amount of time and it has been my experience that their security procedures are oft times lacking.

As a law enforcement agency, are you making efforts to reach out to local churches with crime prevention information? Does your department keep updated contact information handy for church officials? Do your officers regularly check these facilities during the overnight hours? While this arson series is mainly confined to east Texas it's probably not a bad idea for central Texas officers to keep an eye on churches in their towns.