Police official: I ordered office sweeps

Outside security experts were hired for confidentiality reasons.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson said he regularly ordered sweeps of the mayor's office without notifying his superiors when he oversaw mayoral security responsibilities.
Johnson said he often hired outside security experts to conduct the sweeps because he feared city police would fail to keep the operations a secret.
"There are times when we cannot trust the police because of leaks," Johnson told The Philadelphia Inquirer in today's editions. "Once one person in the Police Department knows something, everyone knows something."
Police found hidden listening devices inside Mayor John F. Street's City Hall office during a morning sweep last Tuesday. A federal official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press last week that Street is a "subject" in an FBI probe. Street has said repeatedly that he was told by federal prosecutors that he is not the target of an investigation.
The FBI has said the bugs are not connected to Street's re-election campaign against Republican challenger Sam Katz. The election is Nov. 4.
Reason for sweep
In an interview with the Inquirer on Sunday, Johnson said he ordered the sweep because of the "very, very bitter" tenor of the election and because he had heard that Katz's campaign offices had also been recently swept. Johnson's former boss, John F. Timoney, said he could recall only one or two sweeps of the mayor's office when he was commissioner and did not know of any outside experts hired to conduct the checks.
But Johnson, who has directly overseen mayoral security since about 1986, said Timoney and John J. Norris, a former deputy police commissioner who served as commander of Internal Affairs, were generally unaware of the sweeps.
"I was doing my job," Johnson said. "I didn't tell Timoney every time I made a drug raid."