A new driving course at the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy shows why state officials have wanted to expand the facility for years.
Officers and recruits from across Indiana come to the state-run facility in Plainfield to stay up-to-date on policing tactics before returning to the streets. On the emergency vehicle operations track, for example, instructors show them how to chase cars around hairpin turns and recover from skids.
They just can’t do that, however, while anyone is firing at the facility’s nearby shooting range.
Otherwise, they may be struck by a bullet.
That’s because even as Indiana state lawmakers poured $107 million and counting into recent academy renovations — going tens of millions of dollars over budget — state officials appear to have overlooked a dangerous shortcoming at the range.
Shooters’ rounds are supposed to land in the berm, a tall dirt mound at the end of the range. But construction workers have been finding bullets in other parts of the campus — sometimes hundreds of feet away from their target, according to a whistleblower complaint — since at least 2023, IndyStar has found.
The berm was packed so full of old rounds that new bullets were ricocheting away.
The ILEA faced “recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees,” Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors concluded in a safety order on May 22, 2025, two months after a whistleblower filed a complaint.
By then, academy leadership appeared to have known about the problem for more than a year. In 2023, construction workers clearing out brush to make way for the facility’s new driving course found spent rounds in the dirt and notified academy leadership.
Then in October 2024, just hours before then-Gov. Eric Holcomb was set to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the new scenario-based training facility, a street sweeper collected shrapnel from the new track, according to internal emails reviewed by IndyStar.
“The main concern was the shrapnel from the range,” deputy director Jennifer Fults wrote. “I have asked them to be done by 10 a.m.”
So far, no one has been hurt. State lawmakers also recently approved spending another $1.7 million to hopefully remedy the problem, months after IndyStar started asking questions about the range.
But until the fixes are made, academy leadership have been forced to restrict some parts of the campus as taxpayers pay out millions to modernize the facilities and training.
And even with the restrictions, one Indianapolis police detective said his patrol vehicle was still struck by a ricocheting bullet.
‘An obvious safety issue’
For years, the land behind the range sat vacant. In 2023, construction workers began making preparations to turn it into the state’s largest police driving track. They found bullets as they cleared the way to lay asphalt.
Laborers from the nearby Department of Correction facility packed new dirt into the berm to fix the problem. It didn’t work.
According to an NRA guideline later referenced in state labor inspectors’ documents, each lane of a berm should be emptied out once it captures 20,000 bullets. By the time ILEA Executive Director Tim Horty requested more than $300,000 for range remediation on June 11, 2024, there were at least a dozen times that many bullets packed into the dirt.
Consultants from both the National Rifle Association and range builder Action Target agreed that the berm was too short, Horty said on June 17, 2024. Academy leadership decided to build a wooden fence on top of the range to extend its height. That didn’t work, either.
And the new track wasn’t the only place where the bullets were landing. Tom Lahay, then a staff instructor at the ILEA, knew of fragments found in unrestricted areas. In an interview with IndyStar, Lahay identified himself as the whistleblower behind the March 2025 OSHA complaint.
In response to the complaint, an OSHA inspector walked the campus on April 7, 2025, and found a fragment. The labor department issued a “serious” violation and a $900 fine. (In January 2026, the agency agreed to downgrade the violation to “nonserious” and waive the fee once abatement is complete.)
By the time the inspector met with Horty to discuss his findings on May 30, 2025, the $300,000 remediation project was almost done. The academy contested the $900 fine, reasoning that abatement was already underway.
But it soon became apparent that the remediation didn’t fix the problem, either. The range reopened, and bullets continued to be found in places they didn’t belong.
“I was never a detective,” Lahay wrote in a June 11, 2025 email reviewed by IndyStar, “but this seems like an obvious safety issue for any employee that may be working around that facility while the outdoor range is being utilized.”
The new driving track, built just a year earlier during an $18 million phase of the campus construction project, remained off-limits to police and recruits while anyone was shooting at the range.
A vehicle gets struck
The academy’s leadership relied on this restriction as a temporary fix to keep everyone safe while they figured out a permanent solution.
But then an IMPD detective said his car was struck by a bullet while in a different part of the campus.
It could have happened in one of two areas, Detective Matthew Plummer wrote on July 2, 2025 to Lt. Tim Dowdy, an ILEA staff instructor.
It may have happened while he was parked at the scenario training village, he said, but he thinks it happened when he was parked on a patch of asphalt enclosed within the old driving track.
“I remember hearing a metal-on-metal strike on the roof of my vehicle followed by a rattle,” the detective wrote in an email to the academy on July 1, 2025.
Plummer initially dismissed the sound, he wrote, but when rain leaked into the SUV’s interior days later, he inspected the top of his vehicle and found a bullet-sized hole.
“I can confirm an IMPD vehicle is believed to have been damaged while at ILEA,” Sgt. Amanda Hibschman, an IMPD spokesperson, told IndyStar in an email.
Horty, the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy director, is not convinced that the bullet came from the academy’s range. Horty pointed to his decades of experience as an Indianapolis police officer to say that the IMPD car could have been struck while parked outside of a police station.
“I’ve worked in those neighborhoods, and New Year’s Eve — who knows how many bullets are going?” Horty told IndyStar.
In his email, the detective had also raised the possibility that his vehicle could have been struck while sitting unused outside of an IMPD station for months. But, he wrote, he’d taken the vehicle through a car wash several times in the week before his visit to the academy and hadn’t once had a problem with water getting inside.
Either way, Horty decided to close off access to another area while officers and cadets fired into the range. Part of the scenario village’s parking lot became restricted, too.
“Let me assure you, the public, and anyone who is bothered by this situation,” Horty told IndyStar. “It’s a dangerous situation. I don’t dispute that one bit. What I do take credit for is that as soon as we found out about it, we stopped the training. We are finding a way to determine what a fix is.”
Still, the old track remains unrestricted, even though the IMPD detective suspects that’s where his vehicle was struck.
It’s unclear whether Plummer was aware of the recent OSHA investigation at the time of his visit. Of the 45 police departments contacted by IndyStar for this story, leaders from only three acknowledged that they were aware of safety problems at the range. Most did not respond.
Horty also acknowledged that it was possible but unlikely for rounds to leave the property altogether, though he’s never received any reports of stray bullets from neighbors. Brittany Daker, who lives in the Glen Haven neighborhood a few hundred feet from the range, said she’s warned kids not to play on the hill behind her house that abuts academy property. She’s never found a bullet in her yard, but she said the sound of gunfire is constant.
For Lahay, the rounds landing on the track aren’t just a safety hazard: They’re emblematic of a project that prioritized building new facilities rather than using them to their full potential.
“I personally think that more time and effort – and perhaps money – should have been spent on building a true, up-to-date, defensible scenario-based training program curriculum before spending all that money on facilities to support it,” Lahay said.
After his departure from the academy, Lahay filed a lawsuit alleging workplace discrimination based on age, sex and race. The parties reached a settlement in April 2026.
ILEA requests money for range
After the campus renovation project ran more than $30 million over its initial projected cost, state lawmakers have grown skeptical of spending more money on the ILEA.
In October 2025, Horty went before the State Budget Committee to ask for $8.1 million to refurbish 40 old dorm rooms.
In response, state Sen. Ryan Mishler, the chamber’s top Republican budget-writer, read out the ILEA’s yearly requests between 2021 and 2024, which he said totaled $110 million.
“I hope this is the last time you come in front of us and ask for money for ILEA,” Mishler said.
“Yes, sir,” Horty responded. Lawmakers approved the request.
The interaction stood in contrast to the atmosphere during the Holcomb administration.
Back then, Holcomb characterized the academy’s renovation as a historic investment in Indiana’s public safety, and in 2021, the Indiana General Assembly approved $70 million for the project as part of a bipartisan police reform bill.
That’s in part because a task force convened by Holcomb in 2019 found the ILEA’s facilities and curriculum sorely outdated. Students needed to move from the classroom and into the field for hands-on training, the task force’s authors said, which would require drastic changes not only to the lesson plans but also to the facilities.
Among its authors’ primary recommendations were a scenario-based training village and a new driving track. This was a “very big lift,” the report acknowledged, but a necessary move to adequately train Indiana’s police officers.
“Making changes of this magnitude is the right thing to do for our young officers. We owe it to them,” the task force, which included Horty, concluded in its report.
After project costs ballooned thanks in large part to COVID-era inflation, federal American Rescue Plan Act money provided another $15.6 million.
But the mood for spending has changed in a post-Holcomb world. His successor, Gov. Mike Braun, has followed in the footsteps of the second Trump administration and ordered most state agencies to trim their budgets by 5%.
For the ILEA, that included slashing five open instructor positions one month after an outside consultant’s May 2025 report warned that the academy was operating with “a skeletal instructor cadre.”
Braun, whose authority includes appointing the Indiana State Police superintendent and other members of the Law Enforcement Training Board that oversees the ILEA, did not specifically answer IndyStar’s questions about whether his administration was aware of the consultant’s findings or years of safety concerns at the gun range.
Four of the board’s 23 members, including ISP Superintendent Anthony Scott, were appointed by Braun.
“Gov. Braun will continue to ensure our officers have the resources they need and deserve,” a spokesperson for the governor’s office wrote to IndyStar in an email.
Scott, who chairs the Law Enforcement Training Board, went before the State Budget Committee on April 16 to request $1.7 million for a “horizontal ricochet capturing system.”
“Back when (the range) was built, there was woods behind it. And that was the ricochet zone, so therefore we didn’t know the problem existed until we started building the new track, as a part of the new construction,” Scott said.
He did not mention that OSHA had investigated and ordered the problem permanently fixed by June 1, 2027.
The ILEA consulted with the range’s original builder, which proposed three options to stop bullets from leaving the range. Two of them would have involved removing the berm entirely and replacing it with a bullet trap, made of either steel or rubber.
The academy chose the other option, which was also the cheapest and easiest to maintain. The berm will be partially rebuilt. A new overhead structure is supposed to deflect ricochets back into the range, and existing side walls will be extended.
The $1.7 million fix will amount to less than 2% of the final expected costs to renovate the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy. That’s compared to more than $30 million spent on new dorms.
“A variety of design proposals were ultimately removed from the initial plan due to available resources and the need to prioritize renovations within the allocated budget to ensure fiscal responsibility while best serving our students,” Horty wrote in an email to IndyStar.
Horty said that he hopes construction on the range repair will begin this year. It will take four months to complete.
Until then, the restrictions at the ILEA will remain in effect.
Ryan Murphy is the communities reporter for IndyStar. She can be reached at rhmurphy@indystar.com.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Over budget, under fire: Stray bullets escape gun range at Indiana Law Enforcement Academy
Reporting by Ryan Murphy, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Ryan Murphy, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
