[Ed. note: when police coerce sex workers into sexual acts with explicit threats of violence or simply with the implicit power of their badge, that is rape.]
Earlier this year, the Anchorage Police Department sent one of its top officials to Juneau with a request for lawmakers: Don’t pass a bill making it illegal for police to have sexual contact with a person they are investigating.
The proposed House Bill 73 and Senate Bill 112 are offensive to law enforcement officers and unnecessary because myriad laws and regulations already govern such conduct, said Anchorage Police Department Deputy Chief Sean Case.
But there’s an awkward caveat: In some “very, very limited” circumstances, the Anchorage Police Department wants to reserve the right for an undercover officer to have certain forms of sexual contact in the course of an investigation, Case said.
He knows that isn’t going to sound good. And he wants to explain.
A zero-sexual-contact rule would doom investigations of prostitution — which remains illegal in Alaska — because sex workers have in the past quickly caught on to what police are allowed or not allowed to do in the course of such investigations, Case said.
It all comes down to touching, he said: Prostitutes have used a technique known as “cop checking” to immediately identify officers and shut down an investigation.
“(In an undercover investigation) they ask one simple question: ‘Touch my breast.’ OK, I’m out of the car. Done. And the case is over,” said Case, offering a hypothetical example of what he thinks might happen if the law passed. “If we make that act (of touching) a misdemeanor we have absolutely no way of getting involved in that type of arrest.”
The lobbying appears to have worked. House Bill 73 and Senate Bill 112 are both waylaid in committee hearings and appear to be going nowhere in the Legislature, which is struggling to address Alaska’s fiscal crisis.
The sponsor of the Senate bill, Anchorage Democrat Berta Gardner, has all but abandoned her efforts, saying she has “decided to focus her efforts elsewhere.” She wrote in an email that an explanation from the Department of Law suggested the law wasn’t needed.
But the bills have succeeded in raising questions about how far Alaska cops should — and do — go when investigating prostitution.
