AUSTIN (KXAN) — Early voting for the March primary election begins on Tuesday, and with two challengers vying to unseat the current Travis County Sheriff, the Democratic primary race is heating up.
Incumbent Sheriff Sally Hernandez won the race in 2016.
She said connecting with marginalized groups and building community trust were her main goals when she started this job, and that’s what she wants to continue if re-elected.
She said they “can’t stop and can’t slow down” on their work improving mental health treatment in the community, in the jail, and for her own deputies. She referenced the success of programs like a Peer-to-Peer review she started in her own agency and a crisis-training program created for families and friends of incarcerated people.
“I’m a lot better than doing than I am saying. I am one of those people who wants to roll up my sleeves and keep my promise,” Hernandez said.
Her two challengers spent their day with their sleeves rolled up too, out campaigning and putting up signs.
Both Liz Donegan, who led APD’s Sex Crimes Unit for nearly 10 years, and John Loughran, who served in the Travis County Sheriff’s office for nearly 25 years before being terminated, said specific incidents pushed them to run against Hernandez.
For Donegan, it was the moment Hernandez and her office pulled out of the Sexual Assault Response and Resource Team (SARRT), an organization Donegan has co-chaired.
“It’s so tied to the misconceptions and perceptions of sexual assault,” Donegan said. “For us to move forward, we have to have healthy discourse.”
Donegan said that discourse can’t happen unless survivors, experts and law enforcement are all sitting at the same table: that’s why she decided to run.
As issues like the handling of sexual assault cases come to the forefront of the debate, many people have compared it to the race for Travis County District Attorney.
Hernandez maintains that her decision to pull out of the SARRT had nothing to do with the District Attorney’s choice to do the same.
“We stopped attending meetings when they moved from collaboration, to a lot of conflict,” Hernandez said. “We are still very connected to the advocates that are a part of SAART, we just don’t go to the meetings. It has absolutely not hindered the way we handle sexual assault cases.”
Whoever wins the primary will face Republican candidate Raul Vargas in November.
KXAN’s Avery Travis sat down with all three Democratic primary candidates, and will have more tonight at 10 p.m.
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