The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Michigan In Color
6 — Wednesday, September 30, 2020 

As a first-year living on 

campus during a widespread 
pandemic, my concerns about 
daily life at the Univeringly 
continue 
to 
increase. 
The 

administration does not seem 
to be taking the struggles of 
students into consideration, 
evident from the increase 
in our tuition, prevalence of 
lab fees and blatant lack of 
student testing. When I sit 
at home, watching my asyn-
chronous recorded lectures, I 
can’t help but wonder whether 
attending this school right 
now is worth the thousands 
of dollars I am paying. And 
when I receive an email that 
announces the reintroduction 
of the Big Ten football season, 
I definitely begin to consider 
whether getting my degree is 
worth risking my life.

In 
complete 
candidness, 

it is very hard to argue that 
any class should be in-person. 
You can attempt to justify it 
by pointing out students are 
undergoing regular testing, 
though they truly aren’t, but 
consider my situation: I am a 
freshman living in an apart-
ment complex on campus. 
There is no requirement to test 
me or anyone else in the build-
ing who also has in-person 
classes. One week ago, I called 
the COVID hotline offered 
by the University to report a 
party that could literally be 
heard three floors above me. 
After explaining that nobody 
is close enough to do anything, 
I was referred to building 
security, who referred me to 
the Ann Arbor Police Depart-
ment, who said the only option 
available was to file a noise 
complaint. It is a frustratingly 
ignorant assumption to think 
that socially starved teenag-
ers in one apartment complex 
will choose to remain socially 
distant. And the resources 
that have been offered to 
tackle gatherings which dis-
regard COVID-19 guidelines 
have been of no use. It is more 
abhorrent that the university 
has prioritized profit over the 
health and safety of its stu-
dents. Quite frankly, even edu-
cation is not a valid reason to 
group college students togeth-
er during a pandemic — health 
and safety must obviously be 
the number one priority. 

Testing 
students 
for 

COVID, one of my only hopes 
for a semblance of safety on 
campus, has been abysmal. 
From early August to Aug. 
20, there were a total of 1,306 
tests administered: a number 
which seems ridiculously low, 
and not nearly large enough to 
actually determine how many 
students are walking around 
campus infected. With nearly 
30,000 students, only around 
4-5 percent were tested in the 
beginning of August; a rate 
that clearly shows where the 
University’s priority lies. Now 
the University has promised to 
increase testing up to 6,000 a 
week by the end of September. 
This is an effort I appreciate, 

but it’s not enough. Where is 
the logic in pairing new safety 
efforts with reopening the Big 
Ten football season? Granted, 
football players will all under-
go testing, and players that 
test positive for COVID will 
be forced to sit out of the game 
for a minimum of 21 days. But 
has the University not learned 
that 
reintroducing 
popular 

entertainment is cause for 
more reckless get-togethers 
among college students? 

Aside from the seemingly 

contradictory policies, it is 
hard for me to wrap my head 
around the concept of paying 
more money to be in a place 
where my health is not a pri-
ority. The $50 fee required 
from each student, which was 
used to create the masks and 
kits, made me wonder why the 
university had not utilized 
its other forms of income and 
endowments which could have 
provided these essentials for 
life on campus. Instead, they 
rely on students, who may be 
facing the most difficult time 
in their lives. And if cost must 
be added, could the nones-
sential fees at least be taken 
away? For instance, Bio 173, 
an introductory biology lab 
class, requires students to pay 
$45 for laboratory supplies. 
However, if I am not going to 
be in a lab, where is my money 
going, if not toward my own 
learning? 

Paying extra only to have 

been followed by canceled 
classes for a week seems 
ludicrous. While I sincerely 
appreciate the efforts of the 
Graduate Employees Organi-
zation in terms of fighting for 
a safer environment for both 
students and staff, I wish the 
administration was capable 
enough 
of 
controlling 
the 

situation at hand so it didn’t 
have to reach a point where 
education had to have been 
disrupted. The reaction to 
efforts calling for the right to 
work remotely, vigorous plans 
for testing and preventing the 
spread of COVID-19 was met 
with a lawsuit, an action that 
screams louder than words. 
South Quad currently has 13 
positive cases of COVID-19, 
and cases are confirmed in 
most other dorms: Bursley, 
Couzens, West Quad, North 
Quad and so on. Nonetheless, 
college proceeds to go on in-
person and this shows me that 
my money is valued more than 
I am. As a freshman who spent 
the entire senior year of high 
school looking forward to 
attending the university, this 
is deplorable. If the proper 
protocol was enacted when 
the numbers were low per-
haps the number of positive 
cases wouldn’t have gotten to 
this state. With the University 
creating more opportunities 
for students to get together, 
I wouldn’t be surprised if we 
lived tip-toeing on ice next 
year as well. At this point, I 
wouldn’t consider the Univer-
sity to be either leaders nor 
best, a reality all students are 
going to have to face if proper, 
serious precautions are not 
installed immediately.

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By Jeff Stillman
©2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
09/30/20

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

09/30/20

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2020

ACROSS

1 Contentious 

marketing clash

6 Firmly fixed

10 “Capisce?” 

response

14 Hang loosely
15 Lunch box treat
16 Work at a 

keyboard

17 Cliff dwelling
18 Caboose
19 Kuwaiti ruler
20 *Founding 

Father who 
inherited a 
malthouse

22 Packs down
24 Many corp. logos
25 *“War and Peace” 

author

28 Student’s second 

try

31 Went undercover
32 Poem of homage
33 Kitchen 

enticement

34 Demean
36 Litter sound
37 *“Hee Haw” 

cohost

40 Backboard 

attachment

43 Snaky formations
44 Type of pool or 

wave

48 Make a move
49 QB’s miss, 

maybe

50 Former Spanish 

currency

51 *Outlaw 

associate of Cole 
Younger

55 Wondering word
56 Extremely small
57 Give up, or what 

you might do 
before the starts 
of the answers to 
starred clues

60 Class of 

merchandise

61 Day for Caesar to 

beware

63 Track specialist
64 Mathematician 

Turing

65 “Great shot!”
66 Serving holder
67 “SNL” segment
68 Fresh talk
69 Embroidered, say

DOWN

1 To the stars, in 

mottos

2 One with 

aspirations

3 Becomes fond of
4 Capital of Samoa
5 Wetland plant
6 Gift recipient’s 

surprised query

7 Playground 

comeback

8 __ of Tranquility: 

lunar plain

9 Fabled slowpoke

10 Tabloid 

twosomes

11 Chills or fever
12 Single show
13 Poetic 

contraction

21 Pilot’s datum: 

Abbr.

23 Pasta preference
26 Warming periods
27 Source of pliable 

wood

29 Diplomatic HQ
30 Relatively risqué
34 Muscular 

Japanese dog

35 Big tin exporter 

of S.A.

38 Brings together
39 Female in the 

fam

40 Indian friend of 

Sheldon and 
Leonard

41 Low-fat frozen 

dessert

42 Pentateuch peak: 

Abbr.

45 Mammal’s digit 

that doesn’t 
touch the ground

46 Wheaties box 

adorner

47 Like lasagna, say
50 “Gangnam Style” 

performer

52 Manhunt pickup
53 There are 60,000 

of them in a min.

54 Simplifies
58 Rules on plays
59 Cairo’s river
60 Vegas opener
62 Lunes or martes

SUDOKU

7

8
2

6

3

3

6
9

7

1

2

8
3

9

8
3

6

5
2
1

5

8

4

1

4

6
2

6

5
9

“60 characters. 
Bare your soul.

 Get featured in the Daily!”

WHISPER

Introducing the

WHISPER

“Tinder during 
covid season 
is the most 
inner conflict 
I’ve ever had”

“I should stop 
speaking my 
mind when it 
comes to 
pastries”

09/24/20

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

34 Only unanimous 

Baseball Hall of 

Americans 
have 
a 
large 

appetite for television shows 
about police, violent crime 
investigations, dramatic court 
hearings and life in prison. It 
seems like there are endless 
options of shows about these 
topics because the demand 
is so high. I am not exempt 
from this; personally, some 
of my favorites were Crimi-
nal Minds, Brooklyn 99 and 
Mindhunter. But this past 
summer amid protests against 
police brutality, I began to 
grapple with the harm that 
has been caused by the mas-
sive wave of crime television 
since the 1980s, despite my 
love for them.

With any piece of media 

you consume, one of the most 
important things you must 
remember is that what you are 
seeing is not reality. Shows 
such as Law & Order, CSI, and 
Chicago P.D. are written from 
a perspective that is not an 
accurate representation of the 
criminal justice system in the 
United States. These shows 
depict a world of police sav-
iors, fighting crime and chaos, 
saving us from criminals that 
would otherwise disrupt our 
properly functioning society. 
All they want to do is put away 
violent people and make the 
world a better place. But this 
is a lie.

Most police shows are dis-

honest about the amount of 
corruption and brutality that 
officers bring into communi-
ties. They normalize a sys-
tem that is inherently racist 
and violent, with origins as 
slave patrols and current ties 
to white supremacist orga-
nizations. The ‘good cops’ 
who save the day at the end 
of every episode are not who 

most Black Americans see 
when we are stopped by the 
police. Those were not the 
cops that killed Breonna Tay-
lor, George Floyd or Aiyana 
Stanley Jones. The indoctri-
nating images of superhero 
police departments make it 
easier for Americans to call 
violent cops ‘bad’ apples, but 
in reality, police departments 
in the United States kill civil-
ians at much higher rates than 
other wealthy countries such 
as Canada and Australia.

Not only do these television 

shows inaccurately depict the 
police, they also perpetuate 
harmful myths about people of 
color in marginalized neigh-
borhoods. 
Entertainment 

media often overrepresents 
violent crime and Black and 
Brown suspects, compared to 
white-collar crime and White 
suspects. 
These 
narratives 

gloss over the effects of white 
supremacy and lack of access 
as a result of institutionalized 
and systemic racism and capi-
talism that have legitimized 
these communities as “crime-
ridden.” 

Beyond 
perceptions 
of 

policing within communities 
of color, the media’s portray-
als of the prison industrial 
complex, and the workers 
within it, contribute to the 
widespread 
acceptance 
of 

mass incarceration and police 
brutality in the U.S. For exam-
ple, in nearly every episode of 
the fifteen season television 
series, Criminal Minds, FBI 
agents who specialize in high-
level crimes committed by 
serial criminals are presented 
with a case that they need to 
solve. The episode structure 
is usually the same: the team 
arrives at the scene, and soon 
another crime is committed 
by the same person so they 
feel the pressure to find the 
suspect before someone else 

is harmed. This indicates that 
if the FBI weren’t working 
around the clock to find them, 
more crime occurs. Viewers 
watching continue to believe 
that they need more police 
officers and federal agents 
in their town to keep them 
safe, even though the crimes 
depicted in the media are sig-
nificantly less severe than the 
survival crimes committed in 
said neighborhoods — such as 
food theft as a survival tactic, 
which the system causes by 
keeping civilians from these 
resources in the first place.

In addition to the desire to 

have more policing, we begin 
to accept police brutality as 
part of the job to ensure the 
safety of others. In one epi-
sode of Criminal Minds, an 
unarmed man who is suspect-
ed of sexual assault is shot and 
killed by an agent after he is 
released 
from 
questioning. 

The agent lies and says she 
killed him in self-defense. We 
are left to empathize with the 
FBI agent because his murder 
is better than the possibility 
of him committing another 
crime. We have to deconstruct 
this way of thinking. Why is 
execution the only way we can 
keep communities safe? We 
must also recognize that no 
matter how law enforcement 
feels about individuals they 
interact with, they should 
not have the power to be the 
judge, jury and executioner. 
If they can justify violence 
against that man, they can do 
the same against anyone. 

In addition to media affect-

ing society’s attitudes about 
how police officers should 
treat 
citizens, 
they 
also 

impact why we think we need 
police officers in the first 
place. In her New York Times 
article, “Yes, We Mean Liter-
ally Abolish the Police,” Mari-
ame Kaba reminds us that the 

police don’t do what most peo-
ple think they do. The average 
police officer only makes one 
felony arrest in a year. Most 
of their time is spent respond-
ing to noncriminal issues. The 
media portrayals of communi-
ties full of violence and cops 
running to the rescue and 
directly restoring the peace 
have contributed to the sup-
port of harsher policing on the 
streets and more prisons in 
urban areas when there isn’t 
any need. In fact, these shows 
fail to display the consequen-
tial harm that police bring 
into Black communities such 
as extreme violence, family 
separation, mental and physi-
cal abuse, school to prison 
pipelines and so on.

I’m not saying everyone has 

to stop watching any televi-
sion show or film that features 
police or detectives because 
that 
would 
be 
essentially 

impossible. But I implore you 
to understand the vast differ-
ences between what is depict-
ed on the screen versus the 
reality of the PIC and what 
Black Americans experience 
daily. Remember that media 
industries are capitalizing on 
and reinforcing a system that 
has been harming the image 
and lives of Black and Brown 
people for decades. As some-
one who believes in the abo-
lition of the PIC as a whole, 
I know how powerful a tool 
imagination is. We must be 
able to reimagine a world in 
which police and prisons do 
not exist because they are 
not needed. We could create 
a world where community 
members care for each other 
and police budgets are redis-
tributed into social programs. 
We have to understand the 
realities within our own com-
munities instead of relying 
on crime television to tell us 
about our own communities.

Television’s role in the Prison Industrial Complex

 CAMILLE MOORE

MiC Blogger

ZOOM CLASSROOM VIA UNSPLASH

COVID as a freshman:

My life is worth more than my money

SYEDA MAHA

MiC Columnist

“As a freshman who spent the 

entire senior year of high school 

looking forward to attending the 

university, this is deplorable.”

