Riverside District Attorney Michael Hestrin has apparently won re-election with 55% of the votes.
Attorney Lara Gressley received 23% of votes, and former Riverside Superior Judge Burke Strunsky won 22% of votes. Any candidate who received more than 50% of the votes in the primary will be declared the winner when the election is certified and the results are official.
Follow the latest primary election updates for both counties here.
Hestrin told Follow Our Courts in advance of the election that he wants to focus his third term on making full use of the 2-month-old CARE Court, a county program that allows homeless people to plead guilty to certain crimes and be placed in a court-ordered treatment program.
The program, which is non-punitive, attempts to get people the treatment they need to break the cycles of homelessness, Hestrin said.
“We are going to have to contend with (homelessness). We can’t just pretend it’s a housing issue,” Hestrin said.
In his past two terms, Hestrin created an internal review system and digitized the office’s filing system, he said. He created a crime prevention unit designed to increase community outreach among the county’s youth. He made an organized crime unit, and a collaborative courts unit that works with judges and rehabilitation services to improve recidivism rates, he said.
