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[Clearwater] Police work for Scientology

St. Petersburg Times. St. Petersburg, Fla.: Mar 22, 2001. pg. 14.A Abstract (Article Summary)

Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Thomas Penick, who has the unenviable task of refereeing sidewalk skirmishes between the Church of Scientology and anti-Scientology protesters in Clearwater, recently pointed to an arrangement that allows off-duty Clearwater cops to work for Scientology and noted, "They are coming very dangerously close to becoming a private security force for the Church of Scientology."

The situation seems bizarre to observers who know that since the church moved into Clearwater under a false identity in the 1970s, the relationship between Scientology and the Clearwater Police Department has been cool at best, outwardly hostile at worst. The police gathered intelligence on Scientology for years, amassing an enormous investigative file. The church struck back by writing attack pieces about the police, printing them in Scientology publications and throwing them on residents' lawns. The relationship worsened after the suspicious death of church member Lisa McPherson in a Scientology hotel and the arrival of the Lisa McPherson Trust, which is organized and operated out of downtown offices by Scientology critics. Copyright Times Publishing Co. Mar 22, 2001

Hubbard's 1975 plan was to find "dirt" on local officials in Clearwater order to control them.

From Bare-faced Messiah, p. 337

The aim of `Project Power' was to `establish the indispensability of United Churches' in the community and the means of achieving the objective involved classic Hubbardian strategy.
`The overall plan is to locate opinion leaders -- then, their enemies, the dirt, scandal, vested interest, crime of the enemies (with overt data as much as possible). Then turn this over to UC [United Churches] who will approach the opinion leader and get his agreement to look into a specific subject (which will lead to the enemies' crimes). UC then "discovers" the scandal, etc, and turns it over to the opinion leader for his use. Ops [operations] can be done as a follow up to remove or restrain the enemy.'

Anyone who wants to read Bare-Faced Messiah can find it online.

There is a good index for the book (google-cache page takes a while to load).