James Densley (born 13 April 1982) is a British-American sociologist and Professor of Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University.
[20] Densley studied under mafia scholars Diego Gambetta and Federico Varese, and his work seems to reflect his time with them from his methods, to his theory, and focus on social organizations.
After the UK Prime Minister David Cameron blamed the riots on gangs,[23] Densley was one of the first academics to question this logic.
[6] Densley also used signaling theory to advance a model of disengagement from gangs that allows ex-gang members to communicate their unobservable inner change to others and satisfy community expectations that desistance from crime is real.
[35] His later work looked at debt bondage and child exploitation in county lines drug dealing,[36][37] and how expressive uses of social media by gang members, such as posting rap videos to YouTube, helped advance gang members’ material interests in county lines.
[38] In their first project, Densley and Peterson partnered with the Minnetonka Police Department to develop a new mental illness crisis intervention training for law enforcement, known as The R-Model.
[39][40][41] With funding from the National Institute of Justice, Densley and Peterson next built a database of all public mass shooters since 1966 coded according to 150 life history variables.
[45][46] In a 2019 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that went viral,[47] The Violence Project presented a new, hopeful, framework to understand mass shootings.
Based on interviews with mass shooters and people who knew them, Peterson and Densley found mass shooters had four things in common: (1) early childhood trauma; (2) an identifiable crisis point with suicidal ideation; (3) validation for their grievance, having studied past shootings to find social proof of concept; and (4) the means to carry out an attack.
The character of Jamie Patterson in the spy novel, Jihadi Apprentice by David Bruns and J.R. Olson is based on James Densley.