04/09/2025
By Karen Mullins

The School of Criminology and Justice Studies is proud to announce a Dissertation Proposal Defense:
Alejandro J. Beutel’s Dissertation Proposal Defense
Title: Brownshirts among blue uniforms: A behavioral typology of far-right extremists in U.S. police departments, 1915-2025
Friday, April 25, 10 a.m. - Noon
Health and Social Sciences Building, 4th floor

Committee:

Neil Shortland, PhD, Committee Chair, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Melissa Morabito, PhD, Professor, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Amber H. Ruf, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Steve S. Sin, PhD, Associate Research Scientist, University of Maryland College Park

Abstract:

Recent media, scholarly, and policymaker attention has highlighted a longstanding, but generally understudied public policy issue, namely, far-right extremist presence within U.S. police agencies. Public attention has been driven not only by opposition to what these ideologies stand for, but their potentially detrimental impacts on specific policing agencies, the policing profession writ large, and the communities they serve and protect. Public responses have included calls for changes in legislation, departmental policies, and increased civilian oversight. Existing scholarly and grey literature is sparse and atheoretical; public knowledge is largely based on media reporting. Thus, current knowledge is based on anecdotes rather than a methodologically rigorous, systematic, and transparent documentation and empirical analysis of the phenomenon.
To fill these lacunae, this proposed project has four aims. First is to develop an original open source dataset of far-right extremist behaviors among U.S. policing personnel. Second it will identify empirical relationships between behavior types and various demographic and environmental factors, as well as administrative/legal outcomes. Third it will perform a Social Network Analysis of select networks, based on case study design, to qualitatively highlight the social connections that enable behavioral misconduct among groups of police personnel. Fourth, it will identify how specific behaviors documented in the dataset co-occur with each other to provide the empirical basis of a behavioral typology for far-right extremist U.S. police personnel. Behavioral types are identified from emerging themes in the coded data using a combination of Thematic Content Analysis and a Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) analytic technique called Smallest Space Analysis (SSA).