Outlet profile

Police1

U.S. law-enforcement trade/industry press

Owned byOwned by Lexipol Media Group, which is owned by the private equity firm GTCR (acquired Lexipol in 2021)

FundingAdvertising and sponsored content from law-enforcement product/service vendors, plus revenue tied to Lexipol's broader policy, training, and consulting business for police agencies

On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

Police1 was founded in 1999 (as PoliceOne) by Alex Ford to give law-enforcement officers a dedicated online hub for news, training, and product information. It built a large readership among police professionals, and in 2019 PoliceOne merged with Lexipol, a company founded in 2003 that sells policy manuals, training, and risk-management services to public-safety agencies; the merger folded Police1 into what became Lexipol Media Group. In 2021, Lexipol itself was acquired by GTCR, a Chicago-based private equity firm, putting a financial sponsor atop the company's ownership structure. Police1's content mixes breaking-news coverage of incidents involving police, officer-safety and tactics articles, product reviews, and columns by law-enforcement trainers and consultants. Because its business model and readership are built around serving police agencies and vendors who sell to them, its editorial posture is generally sympathetic to law enforcement's institutional perspective, though it is not a conventional ideological news outlet. It has occasionally drawn scrutiny for running sponsored or vendor-linked content alongside editorial material, a common critique of trade-press sites tied to an industry-services parent company.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-10-03; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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