Bad-jacketing is a term for planting doubt on the authenticity of an individual's

bona fide In human interactions, good faith () is a sincere intention to be fair, open, and honest, regardless of the outcome of the interaction. Some Latin phrases have lost their literal meaning over centuries, but that is not the case with , which is ...

s or identity. An example would be creating suspicion through spreading false rumors, manufacturing evidence, etc., that falsely portray someone in a community organization as an

informant An informant (also called an informer or, as a slang term, a "snitch", "rat", "canary", "stool pigeon", "stoolie", "tout" or "grass", among other terms) is a person who provides privileged information, or (usually damaging) information inten ...

, or member of law enforcement, or guilty of malfeasance such as skimming organization funds. Snitch-jacketing is a variant of bad-jacketing that specifically aims to present the target as an informer.

History

Scholar

Mark Anthony Neal Mark Anthony Neal is an American author and academic. He is the Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching. Neal has writt ...

writes that the

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...

(FBI) under

J. Edgar Hoover John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American attorney and law enforcement administrator who served as the fifth and final director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) and the first director of the Federal Bureau o ...

used the technique against the

Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was a Marxism–Leninism, Marxist–Leninist and Black Power movement, black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newto ...

(BPP) and other

Black Power Black power is a list of political slogans, political slogan and a name which is given to various associated ideologies which aim to achieve self-determination for black people. It is primarily, but not exclusively, used in the United States b ...

organizations as part of its

COINTELPRO COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltr ...

operations. Neal writes that this technique was effective in isolating key individuals, forcing them out of the organization, and that its effectiveness was enhanced by the tendency of Black Power activists to divide among "rigid racial, ideological, and increasingly gendered" lines. The practice was notably used by FBI informants to create a climate of suspicion within

New Left The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer ...

groups such as the Black Panther Party and

American Indian Movement The American Indian Movement (AIM) is an Native Americans in the United States, American Indian grassroots movement which was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July 1968, initially centered in urban areas in order to address systemic issues ...

(AIM), which resulted in the murders of some activists who had been subjected to bad-jacketing, including Panther Alex Rackley, as well as AIM activists Pedro Bissonette, Byron DeSersa and

Anna Mae Aquash Annie Mae Aquash (Mi'kmaq name ''Naguset Eask'') (March 27, 1945 – mid-December 1975) was a First Nations activist and Mi'kmaq tribal member from Nova Scotia, Canada. Aquash moved to Boston in the 1960s and joined other First Nations and Indig ...

. Jo Durden-Smith claims that this technique was used by U.S. prison guards to undermine targeted prisoners and thus make them vulnerable to manipulation.

References

Bibliography

* * * * * {{poli-term-stub Black Panther Party Federal Bureau of Investigation operations