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

bona fide In human interactions, good faith ( la, bona fides) 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 ...

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”) is a person who provides privileged information about a person or organization to an agency. The term is usually used within the law-enforcement world, where informan ...

, 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 and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...

(FBI) under

J. Edgar Hoover John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation � ...

used the technique against the

Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxist-Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, Califo ...

(BPP) and other Black Power organizations as part of its

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

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 the FBI informants to create a climate of suspicion within the Black Panther Party and

American Indian Movement The American Indian Movement (AIM) is a Native American grassroots movement which was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July 1968, initially centered in urban areas in order to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police ...

(AIM), which resulted in the murder of a number of AIM activists that had been subjected to bad-jacketing, including 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 Indi ...

. 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 Police weapons Federal Bureau of Investigation operations