As detailed here in the Daily Iowan, long time Iowa City Artist Virginia Visker was arrested a week ago on drug charges. She was in jail for nearly a week in Manchester, Iowa due to overcrowding at the jail, but was finally released a couple days ago.
You may not think you know Virginia, but if you spend any time at shows, house parties, or just hanging out downtown, you have probably noticed her. Gaunt, always dressed in men’s work clothes, with an unruly head of gray hair, she has a unique voice, hoarse and loud, like she’s spent the last 30 years screaming and she’s trying to talk past the laryngitis. She was a member of the infamous and legendary band Possum Sack, one of the only groups ever banned from Gabe’s (now the Picador), strictly on the basis of how ‘bad’ they sounded.
In Scotland, every town has a few individuals known as ‘Worthies.’ A worthy is always someone whose eccentricity means they stand out in the populace. They’re someone everybody knows, and everyone has a story about. They are revered in their locality precisely because they’re not the regular sort, because they don’t fit in. Virginia Visker is in the best sense of the term one of Iowa City’s worthies. Anyone who knows Virginia knows that she has demons with which she struggles, but they aint no body’s business but her own. What matters is that Virginia is a kind, gentle soul who wouldn’t hurt anyone, and that she is a friend and light in the lives of many.
Comes now the Iowa City Police, who for whatever reason decided to raid her apartment. I presume they had some sort of probably cause — an anonymous tip or confidential informant — but that’s really beside the point. Bales of marijuana and bushels of cocaine are consumed in Iowa City, and the Iowa City Police do fuck all to stem that tide. All they do is target not professional drug dealers, but small time bag splitters.
The ICPD makes choices every day about who they do and do not pursue for various crimes. The arrest of Virginia Visker says to me that they’ll pop someone guileless and amateur, just to make it look as though they’re doing something. In the meantime, those pounds of weed and coke keep flowing, and in my memory they haven’t busted anyone pushing serious weight. I won’t repeat the stories I’ve been told by people in a position to know, but I will say this: There’s plenty of reasons to believe that the police know how the large quantities of drugs enter Iowa City and are distributed. They know, but they don’t do anything to stop it — they just arrest small-timers every so often for show. And I think that’s a dirty shame.
The Iowa City police department likes to prosecute and harrass people who criticize them. I hope to hell I never need to enlist the services of law enforcement in this town. Not likely I’d ever take the stretch to actually report a crime since the only time I ever did resulted in my own arrest and conviction.