iOS prove it's an emergency to call 911

Wanna hear a wild stat? Over 600,000 calls are made to 911 every day in the U.S. If we assume that’s evenly distributed (which there’s no way it is), that’s 12,000 calls in every state per day. I’ve never been a 911 operator, and thankfully I’ve never had to call 911 to report an emergency. I hope I never had to. However, I know that operators across the country do have to deal with their fair share of fraudulent calls.

Making a fake 911 call is serious business. It can result in fines or even jail time. This feels like it’s at odds with how easy it is to make an emergency call on an iPhone. I know this serves a lot of functional purposes other than emergency services calls, but I’d assume that is a primary function they considered when creating this feature.

I wonder what it might look like to introduce some friction to this experience. One could imagine needing to verify that you are in fact in an emergency by taking a photo or video. The obvious pushback is that you could imagine a million reasons why someone would not have the ability or time to capture this footage, so I guess it becomes a question of how much volume a 911 line operator can reasonably handle. I don’t think the current experience is broken, and I do believe this would create a lot more harm than good.

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