Jason Dixon

Jason Dixon is one of the primary antagonists in the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, written and directed by Martin Mcdonagh.

He is portrayed by Sam Rockwell, who also played Justin Hammer in Iron Man 2, William Wharton in The Green Mile, and Eric Knox in Charlie's Angels.

Personality
Dixon is incredibly inept, lazy, and incompetent. Despite wanting everyone around him to respect his authority, he has no qualms with abusing his position of power to do what he wants. He is also openly racist, yet expresses great disdain when people call him out on it.

By the end of the film, he has a change of heart after receiving a letter from his former police chief reinforcing his desire to become a detective, going as far to instigate a fight and get mercilessly beaten in order to obtain a DNA sample of someone suspected of murdering the daughter of a woman he despises.

Biography
After grieving mother Mildred Hayes rents three billboards calling out the police department for the lack of progress in the investigation of the rape and murder of her daughter, she immediately causes a riff in the small town she lives in. While many police officers, including chief Bill Willoughby, express sympathy for her, Dixon finds her lack of respect for the police a nuisance, abusing his powers to threaten the agency responsible for renting the billboards to Mildred and arresting her friend on a trumped-up marijuana possession charge and refusing her bail.

After Willoughby commits suicide due to suffering from terminal cancer, Willoughby reacts by breaking into the ad agency and viciously maiming the owner and his assistant, getting fired by Willoughby's replacement shortly after. The next night, he goes to the police station to look for his missing badge, only to find a letter written to him by Willoughby telling him to reevaluate his life if he wants to become a better lawman and achieve his dreams of becoming a detective. At the same time, Mildred, believing Dixon to have burned down the billboards the previous night, sets the station ablaze with Molotov cocktails. Dixon escapes the blaze with burns all over his body, though managed to salvage the case files on Mildred's daughter.

After he is discharged from the hospital, Dixon drinks at a bar where he overhears two men bragging about a rape one of them had committed, the details of which Dixon finds remarkably similar to Mildred's daughter. After getting the man's license plate number and managing to obtain a sample of his skin, he turns this into the new police chief, who commends him for his efforts. He also uses this time to make amends with Mildred. After it's revealed that the man at the bar was not Mildred's daughter's killer, Dixon and Mildred drive off to the state where the man lives and contemplate whether or not to kill him when they find him.