Agent provocateur

An agent provocateur (plural: agents provocateurs) is a person assigned to provoke unrest, violence, debate, or argument by or within a group while acting as a member of the group but covertly representing the interests of another. In general, agents provocateurs seek to disrupt a group's activities secretly from within the group.

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An agent provocateur is often a police officer whose duty is to make sure suspected individual(s) carry out a crime to guarantee their punishment; or who suggests the commission of a crime to another, in hopes they will go along with the suggestion, so they may be convicted of the crime the provocateur suggested. The phrase comes from the French language, where it means, roughly, "inciting agent".

Related Topics:
Police - Crime - French language

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The activities of agents provocateurs are typically called sting operations. Agents provocateurs are typically used to investigate consensual or "victimless" crimes; since each participant in such a crime is a willing participant, only a police spy posing as a fellow participant in criminal activity is likely to be able to uncover such a crime.

Related Topics:
Sting operation - Consensual - Spy

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Agents provocateurs are also used against political opponents. Here, it has been documented that provocateurs deliberately carry out or seek to incite counter-productive and/or ineffective acts, in order to foster public disdain for the group and provide a pretext for aggression; and to worsen the punishments its members are liable for. Within the United States the COINTELPRO program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had FBI agents posing as political radicals in order to disrupt the activities of political groups the U.S. government found unacceptably radical, such as the Black Panthers. However, since there is some evidence that the Black Panther organization was itself established as a provocation, aimed at disrupting and discrediting the integrationist program and coalition politics strategy of the Civil Rights Movement, this example drawn from FBI archives may be deliberately deceptive. The activities of agents provocateurs against dissidents in Imperial Russia was one of the grievances that led to the Russian Revolution.

Related Topics:
Political opponents - United States - COINTELPRO - Federal Bureau of Investigation - Black Panthers - Imperial Russia - Russian Revolution

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The activities of agents provocateurs pose a number of ethical and legal issues. Within common law jurisdictions, the law of entrapment seeks to discern whether the provocateur's target intended to commit the crime he participated in with the provocateur, or whether the suggestion to commit the crime began with the provocateur. It is also debatable whether the institutionalized deception that the use of agents provocateurs implies is in fact more harmful to the social order than the various consensual offenses typically investigated by provocateurs.

Related Topics:
Ethical - Legal - Common law - Entrapment

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