James Densley is Professor and Department Chair of Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University and co-founder and co-president of The Violence Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center best known for its mass shooter database. Densley has received global media attention for his work on street gangs, criminal networks, violence, and policing. He is the author of seven books, including the acclaimed, The Violence Project: How to Stop A Mass Shooting Epidemic, 50 peer-reviewed articles in leading scientific journals, and over 80 book chapters, essays, and other works in outlets such as CNN, The Guardian, HuffPost, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He is also the co-author of On Gangs (2022), a diverse and comprehensive survey of the available theories for understanding this social issue as well as the broad range of responses to it, and Contesting County Lines: Case Studies in Drug Crime and Deviant Entrepreneurship (2023).

Exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers, Densley has been an invited or plenary speaker on four continents. He is a former middle school special education teacher and in 2017 he was awarded the Points of Light Award for outstanding community volunteerism by the British Prime Minister. Densley earned his doctorate in sociology from the University of Oxford.