James Densley


James Densley is a British-American sociologist and Professor of Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University. Densley has published extensively on street gang issues and has been described as "among the most accomplished rising leaders of modern gang research in criminology." Densley is best known for his ethnography of gang life in London, England, and his applications of economic signalling theory to gang membership. Densley's research examines group processes in gangs and compares gangs with other violent collectives such as hate groups and terror groups. He once compared the Islamic State to a “street gang on steroids”. Densley writes about the “glocalisation” of gang culture, cyber violence, and the role of rap music and social media in gang violence. He is also known for his research into mass shootings.
Densley is a TEDx speaker and has written for CNN, The Conversation, The Guardian, The Herald, HuffPost, Los Angeles Times, MinnPost, Salon, StarTribune, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal on a range of public issues, including gangs and gang responses, gun violence, knife crime, drug sales, school shootings, and violent extremism. He has appeared on CBS This Morning, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, Viceland's Black Market: Dispatches with Michael K. Williams, and on local news to comment on criminal justice issues, including police use of force and law enforcement education and training.

Education and early career

Densley received his B.A. in sociology with American studies from the University of Northampton in 2003. He earned a M.S. in sociology from the University of Oxford in 2004, and then moved to New York City where he enrolled in the NYC Teaching Fellows and taught 7th and 8th grade special education at University Neighborhood Middle School in Manhattan's Lower East Side. In New York, he earned his teacher's license and a master's degree in education from Pace University. In 2007, Densley moved back to England to complete a D.Phil. in sociology from Oxford University's Extra-Legal Governance Institute. 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. Densley graduated in 2011 and was hired by Metropolitan State University that same year. He was promoted to full professor in 2019, aged just 37.

Research

The 2011 England riots occurred just weeks after Densley had finished his PhD, a study of gangs in London. After the UK Prime Minister David Cameron blamed the riots on gangs, Densley was one of the first academics to question this logic. Densley's first book, How Gangs Work, grew out of his PhD research and reflects upon the “war on gangs” launched after the 2011 riots. The British Journal of Criminology mentions the book's “critical ethnography and first-class fieldwork”, concluding that “Densley’s work points the way to how gang research should be done in the future.”
In the book and in later research, Densley used signaling theory to make sense of how and why youth join gangs. He found that prospective gang members signal their potential value to the gang by engaging in violent and criminal acts that are beyond the capacity of most people. 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. For Densley, religious conversion in prison was one example of a disengagement signal.
Densley's work explores the rationality of gang behavior. He developed an influential model of gang evolution that explains the relationship between gangs and organized crime. He found that recreation, crime, enterprise, and governance were not static gang activities or distinct gang types, but instead sequential "actualization stages" in the lifecycle of gangs. Densley's evolutionary model was later validated by studies of gangs in London, England, and Glasgow, Scotland.
Densley also studies illicit drug dealing. In 2012, he warned about the county lines model of drug distribution in which drug‐selling gangs from the major urban areas, like London, send vulnerable youth to exploit markets in other towns and areas: “Most youngers are employed by their elders to work what was known colloquially as the ‘drugs line,’ although some are sent out ‘on assignment’ to explore ‘new markets’ in areas where they are unknown to police; notably commuter cities with vibrant nighttime economies”. His later work looked at debt bondage and child exploitation in county lines drug dealing, 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.

The Violence Project

In 2017, Densley launched The Violence Project with psychologist Jillian Peterson of Hamline University. Densley and Peterson built a database of all public mass shooters since 1966 coded according to 100 different variables. Their research on mass shooters included in-depth analysis of K-12 school shootings and how the Columbine High School massacre became a blueprint for future massacres. Densley and Peterson are critical of active shooter lockdown drills in schools for traumatizing young children and normalizing school violence.
In a 2019 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, The Violence Project presented a new, hopeful, framework to understand mass shootings. Based on a study funded by the National Institute of Justice, Peterson and Densley found mass shooters had four things in common: early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age; an identifiable grievance or suicidal crisis point; validation for their belief system, have studied past shootings to find inspiration; and the means to carry out an attack. This new framework highlights the complexity of the pathway to a mass shooting, including how each one can be “socially contagious”, but also creates a plan to prevent the next shooting. Each one of the four themes represents an opportunity for intervention. By reducing access to firearms, slowing contagion, training in crisis intervention de-escalation, and increasing access to affordable mental healthcare, a mass shooting can be averted. Densley and Peterson's research also shows that to really understand the profiles of mass killers, you have to look at the types of locations they target because K-12 school shooters are different from house of worship shooters, who are different still from workplace shooters and so on.
Densley and Peterson also partnered with the Minnetonka Police Department to develop a new mental illness crisis intervention training for law enforcement, known as The R-Model.

Growing Against Violence

Densley is co-founder of Growing Against Violence, a London-based charity that since 2008 has delivered violence prevention programming to nearly 200,000 children and young people in hundreds of schools. Densley wrote and piloted the original curriculum and later conducted an evaluation of the program. In 2017, Densley was awarded the Prime Minister's Points of Light award for his “outstanding” volunteerism.

Selected publications

The character of Jamie Patterson in the spy novel, Jihadi Apprentice by David Bruns and J.R. Olson is based on James Densley.