This might be the stupidest thing I've ever read on the Internet (outside of Youtube comments). Are you kidding? First, many people who call 911 are calling on behalf of a stranger. Most people aren't going to part with $100 to report something that doesn't affect them directly. Additionally, there are many situations in which calling 911 is totally appropriate, but where the caller doesn't even know whether there is an emergency. For instance, reporting a possible drunk driver (which I have done on several occasions).
Also, when you drive that "false positives" number to zero you also introduce false negatives. People will wait until it is too late to call 911. This could actually have all kinds of negative externalities, like the police getting into more shootouts because things were allowed to spiral out of control.
This is all beside the fact that you are assuming that everyone who would ever need to call 911 has $100 lying around to "top-off" an app (how do people without smartphones use 911, by the way?).
I think $100 is too aggressive a number and everyone seems to have fixated on that.
I'm saying there is a number between $0 and $1,000,000 per call that will help reduce false positives and make the system more efficient. Maybe its $100, maybe its $50, maybes it $5, maybe its $0.
I've always appreciated what London did to solve its traffic congestion problems (http://grist.org/news/the-success-of-londons-congestion-char...) and while I understand they are not truly analogous, I'm a believer in using $ to properly align incentives and make a system more efficient.
I am pretty sure false positives are WAY less dangerous than false negatives. The cost of calling 911 when it is not needed is just money; the cost of not calling could be someones life. Efficiency is not the primary goal.
False positives cost more than just money. There are a finite number of ambulances in any given area. We try to staff to cover the false positives we know we're going to get, but there's just no way to predict when we'll get hit out for a stubbed toe and someone with a head cold they've had for the past three days and someone who forgot to refill their prescription for their cholesterol medication and an intermittent ringing in your left ear (I'm not making these up folks... these are just a sampling of the BS calls I've been on in the past week or two).
So while crews are off dealing with those non-emergencies, they are unavailable to respond to things like cardiac arrests and strokes...
Also, when you drive that "false positives" number to zero you also introduce false negatives. People will wait until it is too late to call 911. This could actually have all kinds of negative externalities, like the police getting into more shootouts because things were allowed to spiral out of control.
This is all beside the fact that you are assuming that everyone who would ever need to call 911 has $100 lying around to "top-off" an app (how do people without smartphones use 911, by the way?).