I got sucked into watching the other night because I was channel surfing while the wife was out...this is the third time I have seen it trying to pick it apart. I like the Coen Bros. movies, there is a certain attempt at humor that works for me, I see humor through out all of their films and I'm not really a sick individual, movies are entertainment and the Coen Bros. never disappoint me.
A good friend of mine finished a hitch in the Marine Corps and was told that they needed cops in Dallas. Being an adventurous type he went down and enrolled in their school, at the time they were very short on recruits. I remember Washington D.C. needed cops back in 1970 so badly they were offering early outs to anyone in the military that wanted to recruit.
Anyway after my friend went through their academy and got on the force his first partner was a woman and he said he learned more from her in the first year than anyone else afterwards. He quit working in Dallas after a couple of years and moved back home to become a city bus driver. One night after a couple of beers I asked him why he quit. He gave me the long story about the training and his partner and a few ugly cop type stories and then said "It was the pressure." I said "Pressure?" He told me that the hardest thing he had to get used to was the constant pressure of his life being on the line, that even a common traffic stop in Dallas was a direct threat on his life and had to be treated as such. I was a little confused so he explained, "Many wanted criminals are caught during traffic stops, in Dallas their are significantly more "serious" criminals than Spokane, WA. Criminals that obviously aren't going out of their way to get thrown back in prison over something as ridiculous as a simple taillight out and will stop at nothing to prevent that from happening. It explains why some cops get blown away for no apparent reason, being in the wrong place at the wrong time makes good sense to me. The bad guy never considered becoming a cop killer until he got pulled over for running a red light in commuter hour traffic with little chance to evade arrest, cop walks up to give him a ticket and bang. My buddy couldn't get over that feeling, he just wanted to be a cop and do his job. Although he understood there could be times when his life could be on the line the idea that just over a simple traffic stop was too much for him, I could respect that.
