For­mer Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith says he is not sur­prised that crim­i­nal charges against for­mer head of the now-dis­band­ed Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Re­sponse Team (SORT), In­spec­tor Mark Her­nan­dez, have been dis­missed, de­scrib­ing the ac­cu­sa­tions as a "joke."

Her­nan­dez was charged in 2021 with at­tempt­ing to per­vert the course of jus­tice af­ter sus­pects An­drew "So­lo" Mor­ris and Joel Bel­con died while in po­lice cus­tody.

An au­top­sy re­vealed both men were beat­en to death.

Mor­ris and Bel­con were sus­pects in the Jan­u­ary 2021 kid­nap­ping and mur­der of Ari­ma Court Clerk An­drea Bharatt.

On Fri­day, High Court Judge Adia Mo­hammed dis­missed the charge against Her­nan­dez.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment, Grif­fith, who served as Com­mis­sion­er in 2021 when the mat­ter arose, said he ex­pect­ed the case to be dis­missed, ac­cus­ing the then PNM gov­ern­ment of tar­get­ing Her­nan­dez, who worked un­der his lead­er­ship.

Grif­fith claimed Her­nan­dez's ar­rest and sub­se­quent charge were linked to his con­sid­er­a­tion for the post of Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (DCP), al­leg­ing that some in au­thor­i­ty feared his ap­point­ment would dis­rupt crim­i­nal net­works from which they ben­e­fit­ted.

"I will al­ways say there are rogue el­e­ments in the po­lice ser­vice and some of them were very con­cerned by me clean­ing up the po­lice ser­vice and re­mov­ing them from the ser­vice.

"They utilised some of their po­lit­i­cal friends to make sure that I was re­moved and al­so some of the peo­ple clos­est to me that were in­stru­men­tal in try­ing to clean up not just the TTPS but the coun­try.

"Crime is a mas­sive busi­ness and peo­ple like my­self and Mark Her­nan­dez and oth­ers were do­ing... we were in­ter­rupt­ing big ma­jor crim­i­nal en­ter­pris­es and we were get­ting close, but God doesn't sleep."