Getting hold of Rachel for an interview has been difficult. We've arranged a time to speak on the phone a couple of times, but she hasn't picked up until now. It's understandable. Prostitution is illegal in Alaska, as it is across most of the US. As a result, sex workers are cautious by definition—and speaking out publicly about alleged police abuse goes against all of her professional instincts.

Rachel*, 45, an Alaskan sex worker, doesn't remember exactly when she got caught up in an undercover police sting operation. "There was snow on the ground," she remembers with unexpected poetry over the phone.

"The Anchorage Police Department has a vice unit that investigates several crimes to include prostitution," responds spokesperson Renee Oistad. "While we will not discuss our investigative techniques, it is against APD's policy for any of our sworn police officers to have sex with a prostitute for any reason; this includes sex-related case work."

"I felt violated," she explains, her voice becoming more emotional. "It was a horrible experience. It was like, because he had a badge, it was okay—he could just do it."

"That's when he looked at me and got this really crazy grin on his face, and he says to me—verbatim—'You're a very wise woman and I'm proud of you.'" Terrified of being arrested, Rachel ran to her car, leaving the money behind. The enormity of the situation only sunk in afterwards.

That's when the police officer told Rachel he was going to arrest her. "I said, 'But I didn't do anything wrong? What are you going to arrest me for?'" Thinking on her feet, Rachel invented a story. She told him that she was attracted to him and had sex with him for pleasure, not work.

"We had sex to completion," she says softly. "The money was on the table, but I didn't touch it. Afterwards, he kept insisting I take the money. It felt very strange."

"He seemed like a completely regular customer until afterwards," Rachel says of the police officer. After posting an escort ad online at some point in the winter of 2008, Rachel answered a hotel out-call.

When Rachel and I finally speak, her voice is flat as she recounts what happened to her—as if it happened to someone else.

Astonishingly, it's not specifically illegal for police officers in many states to have sex with sex workers during the course of sting operations. In Alaska, it is against APD policy for serving police to have sex with sex workers, though it is presently only a specific offence under state law for officers to have sex with someone in custody. Broadly reached out to the APD for further clarification on what punishments might be faced by a police officer caught having sex with a sex worker on the job, but they did not respond to our enquiry.

"The reality of some police having sex with sex workers during the course of undercover operations has been in existence as long as selling sex has been a criminal offense," explains Dr. Alexandra Lutnick, an expert on the US sex industry at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute. A research study that she conducted in San Francisco found that over 14 percent of sex workers said that they had been threatened with arrest unless they had sex with a police officer, and two percent had been arrested after having sex with an officer anyway.

In an email to Broadly, APD maintain that the incident Rachel describes was not reported to them officially. However, Broadly viewed emails between sex worker and Community United for Safety and Protection (CUSP) activist Tara Burns to Captain K.D. McCoy of APD's internal affairs team, discussing Rachel's case. In the emails, which Burns provided to Broadly, McCoy acknowledges that the "incident you described would be a clear violation of our internal policies."

Some legislators, like Democrat politician Matt Claman, are pushing for reform; Claman has just sponsored House Bill 112, which seeks to expand the state's sexual assault laws to prevent police officers from having sexual contact with those they are investigating. Other states have done this already. In Hawaii, legislators amended the law in 2014 to prevent police officers from engaging in sexual conduct during operations, to gripes from Hawaiian cops about how they needed to round fourth base to do all their important detective work.

Anchorage Police Department has past form when it comes to engaging in sexual relations on the job. In 1982, a case involving an APD officer who'd received a hand job from a sex worker during an undercover operation went to the Court of Appeals of Alaska (the court ruled that the sex worker had not been entrapped, and criminal proceedings against her could proceed), and a APD charging document from 2014 references an undercover sting operation during which a sex worker "reached her hand under the towel, touching his [the male officer's] penis."

That same year, Sergeant Kathy Lacey of the APD undercover vice unit told a reporter from The Laura Flanders Show, "There have been incidences of sexual misconduct by police officers, without a doubt. We have one here in Anchorage. That is just gonna happen." (Lacey is now retired.)

Sex workers in Alaska are also coming under increasing attack as a result of new, statewide anti-trafficking laws. In 2012, Alaskan legislators introduced a law that effectively redefined sex trafficking as anything seen to facilitate prostitution, including instances when sex workers work collectively in brothels for mutual protection.

The real threat to sex workers is local police who are getting away with drinking and smoking and sexually assaulting prostitutes on the taxpayer dime.

The results, according to Burns's sex worker alliance, Community United for Safety and Protection (CUSP), are Kafka-esque. In one incident, a sex worker was charged with trafficking herself. In another high-profile case, Alaskan sex worker Amber Batts was convicted of running a sex trafficking ring and sentenced to five years for sex trafficking in the second degree. Her supporters argue that Batts was simply practicing basic harm reduction principles—screening potential clients, providing safe facilities for sex—and that none of the women she worked with were trafficked.