This week, Michigan lawmakers rolled out a bill that would ban law enforcement from using masks. It pointed my mind squarely to pop culture, and how life has been imitating art.
When HBO’s Watchmen premiered in 2019, it was a daring reinvention of the original comic; a visually bold, racially charged, and genre-defying story that imagined a world where police wear masks, white supremacists infiltrate power, and justice is as subjective as it is systemic.
Five years later, it feels less like science fiction and more like a documentary with a time delay.
Police in Masks? Already Happening.
In the Watchmen universe, police officers are required to wear masks to protect themselves from retaliation. At the time, it seemed like a dystopian twist. But we’ve since watched that fiction bleed into reality.
From ICE agents in black tactical gear with covered faces to SWAT teams and local police in riot helmets and tactical masks, anonymity has become the new normal. The justification, of course, is safety. But what happens when a badge becomes faceless and accountability disappears behind a Kevlar mask?
In Watchmen, this anonymity allowed violent state actors to operate with impunity. In our world, we’ve seen the same dynamic play out during protests, immigration raids, and no-knock warrants gone wrong.
You know how you can tell between a masked cop and a vigilante? Me neither.
Laurie Blake, Episode 3
White Supremacy, Deeply Embedded
The HBO series opens with the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, a historical event that too many Americans had never learned about until the show aired. It then jumps to a fictionalized present in which a white supremacist group, the Seventh Kavalry, has embedded itself within law enforcement and government structures.
If that sounds too far-fetched, consider the actual DHS and FBI reports warning about white nationalist infiltration of law enforcement…from 2006.
Or other real real-world examples of officers participating in extremist message boards, sharing memes about civil war, and facing little to no consequence.
Let’s talk January 6th where some members of law enforcement opened the doors for insurrectionists.
Watchmen dares to ask what justice looks like in a system that was never neutral to begin with.
Today, that question is terrifyingly urgent.
Trauma, Vigilantism, and the “Greater Good”
The series doesn’t offer easy heroes. Instead, it complicates every figure: the vigilantes, the police, the victims, and even the institutions.
It demands we wrestle with questions like:
- What happens when trauma becomes the justification for unchecked power?
- When does protection become oppression?
- What do we do when the people sworn to uphold the law are the ones weaponizing it?
In the U.S. today, we’ve seen all of those dilemmas manifest; in ICE raids that tear families apart, in cops who face zero accountability after unjustified killings, in prosecutors who withhold exculpatory evidence without consequences, and in Black and brown communities forced to navigate this broken system every day.
The Nostalgia Is Intentional
Watchmen is also a story about memory. About what we choose to remember and what institutions encourage us to forget.
Whether it’s the whitewashing of American history, the erasure of Black trauma, or the gaslighting that happens after every police shooting, the show’s title—Watchmen—isn’t just about who guards the guards.
It’s about who remembers them and who gets to write the story.
We’re Already Living in Watchmen’s World
At first glance, HBO’s Watchmen seemed like a radical leap: masked cops, racial reckoning, corrupt government tech. But now? The world it imagined feels eerily familiar.
We already live in a time where:
- Police departments operate like private armies, controlled and told what to do by people in power
- Federal agents kidnap protestors in unmarked vans
- American citizens can be deported on rumors
- Whistleblowers are prosecuted while abusers retire with pensions
- Communities bear the burden of institutional betrayal
The question is no longer “Could this happen?” The question is “What are we going to do now that we are here?”
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