Crime Really Doesn’t Pay
Three teenage boys were walking home from school from school last week when three other boys approached them and demanded their money and wallets. When the trio of would-be victims refused and kept walking down Broadway, the thieving threesome followed and managed to grab $2 from one of the boys. Now all three are wanted for robbery, with less than a buck each to show for their misdeeds.

Courtesy of Buzz Bishop

Old Spice Crook
A man was arrested at a local Duane Reade last week after attempting to abscond with a whopping 299 sticks of Old Spice deodorant. (Does anybody sweat that much?) The presumably odoriferous shoplifter also injured an employee who tried to stop him from leaving the store.

Depraved Assault on a Child
Police were alerted last week to the plight of an 8-year-old girl living in the Amsterdam Houses with suspicious injuries on her left hand. When they investigated, officers determined that the girl’s mother had allegedly burned her hand with a fork as punishment for “taking her sister’s tampons.” The mother told cops that her daughter burned herself accidentally while ironing clothes, but her story didn’t jive with the poor girl’s injury and she was arrested on felonious assault charges. The case has been referred to the Special Victims Unit.

Mucous-Free Shoplifter
Last Tuesday at 9:45 a.m., an unknown man waltzed into a local CVS pharmacy and sauntered out with 40 stolen packs of Mucinex, an over-the-counter med meant to combat mucous and coughs. The total haul is worth $1,150, so the thief most likely intends either to get some crystal-clear nasal passages or make a hefty profit reselling the drug on the street.

Bad Boyfriend
A 37-year-old woman called the police after her live-in boyfriend took his alcoholic rage out on her. The woman reported that her drunken mate got angry and attempted to strangle her, then slammed her against a wall and held her there so she couldn’t escape his grasp. He eventually let go and ran off, allowing the victim a chance to call for help.

False Phone Friends
When checking her most recent cell phone bill, a local woman noticed a few extraneous charges—namely that two iPhones had been purchased with her account and a stranger had been added as an “authorized user,” enabling him to change her plan to accommodate the two new phone lines.

Don’t Tempt Thieves
Most criminals can’t resist an easy target, as a local man discovered last week when he placed his wallet on the inside window ledge of his ground-floor apartment on West 78th Street. An unknown person spotted it, and snagged the wallet, attempting four credit card purchases with the stolen loot.

Jackson, who lives and works on the Upper West Side, met Linda Fairstein, then the head of the unit, in the mid 1990s and began following her cases.

“It just became an obsession of mine to try to do a film about the unit,” Jackson says. “The fact that it was the first unit in the country; it really is the gold standard. I thought, rape is so chronically underreported that if you showed a portrait of the prosecutors who do take on these crimes that maybe survivors would be more likely to come forward.”

The film highlights the day-to-day work of the prosecutors and follows two cases in particular—a 16-year-old cold case and another recent rape—both brutal crimes. Jackson interviewed the victim of the older case, Natasha Alexenko, and told the story of how her rapist was finally found using DNA evidence.

“I had pretty much closed that chapter in my life,” Alexenko explains in a recent interview. “I had healed and moved on. It was certainly a shock” when they found the perpetrator. She decided to come forward for the film because she wanted to help the prosecutors who had guided her so compassionately through the difficult process of the trial. “I had actually really been inspired by the men and woman that work in the sex crimes unit,” Alexenko says. “I told them I would do anything I could do to help them.”

Jackson spent about a year getting to know Alexenko before she even filmed the interviews with her. She also followed four or five cases simultaneously but could only use footage from trials that had ended by the time the film aired. She shot many scenes from the trial of Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, the NYPD officers recently acquitted of rape, but wasn’t able to include it.

“I don’t know if it would have changed the film” to include that case, Jackson says. “It would have shown how incredibly difficult their job is, often—in a case like that where there was no hard evidence, there were no eyewitnesses.”

The film also illustrates how cases like that would never have made it to trial before New York State reformed its laws in the 1970s. Jackson interviewed former District Attorney Robert Morganthau about his role in changing the way rape was prosecuted. “I went to him and said, everybody’s talking about your legacy— white collar crime, all this stuff—but nobody’s really talking about the jewel in your crown: his incredible mentoring of women and his championing this unit,” Jackson says. “He’s justifiably proud of that unit.”

Jackson also deliberately included snippets of the prosecutors debating the merits of Derek Jeter and swapping stories about their personal lives.

“A film about sexual violence isn’t depressing. It’s full of humor, it’s full of real humanity,” Jackson says. “They may be really driving, obsessed, laser-focused lawyers, but at the same time, they have obsessions with movie stars, they’re huge Yankees fans, they sweat college loans, they worry about their weight.”

They also work extremely hard at a decidedly unglamorous job. Based on popular TV legal dramas, “we have this perception that they’re all sitting in mahogany-lined offices wearing Prada,” Alexenko says. “And that’s very very far from the truth.”

Both Jackson and Alexenko hope that the film will help victims of sexual assault understand what happens when they come forward to report the crimes against them. Alexenko quit her job last year to work fulltime on her foundation, Natasha’s Justice Project, which works closely with the Joyful Heart Foundation, founded by Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay, to end the national backlog of untested rape kits.

“With my case, the closure I had, I just felt it’s my karmic duty to take the tools, to take my story and help others,” Alexenko says. “There are 180,000 untested rape kits sitting on shelves. We have the means to find these criminals through databases.”

Jackson hopes that viewers will come away with an understanding of how far the legal system has progressed toward helping sexual assault victims, and how hard the sex crimes unit works for justice.

“It’s either happened to one of us, or we know someone it’s happened to,” Jackson says, citing the statistic that one in six women will be the victim of a sexual assault. “I hope that the film brings a new way of looking at the crime itself, and hopefully motivates more women to come forward, more attorneys to dedicate themselves to this kind of law, and really makes the point of the importance of units like this.”