Indiana Law Enforcement Academy (2024)

ILEA’s 15-week basic law enforcement course includes 13 written tests and up to six practical exams. Beyond basic training, the state of Indiana requires officers to complete 24 hours of ongoing training each year. The result? ILEA tracks approximately 312,000 training hours each year for all departments and their officers.

In the past, each Indiana police department would manually compile and submit its in-service training paperwork, often via fax or traditional mail. It took four ILEA full-time employees a minimum of four months to sort through the thousands of officer records, to verify each officer completed the required number of training hours to meet the state’s certification requirements, and enter the data into their legacy system. According to Indiana State Police’s annual report, ILEA processed more than 14,000 training records in 2008. Also, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, on average it takes a minimum of 20 paper documents a year to manage one law enforcement officer. Manual processes were just not keeping pace with the volume of paper records ILEA is required to process every year.

ILEA’s executive director Rusty Goodpaster recognized the organization needed to automate its manual processes with an effective system to manage every officer’s training from basic to yearly in-service requirements through retirement.

Goodpaster has a big job. He not only oversees the academy’s training programs and processes while heading up the Law Enforcement Training Board, but also manages operational budgeting, legislation on training mandates and maintains regular contact with police chiefs and sheriffs across the state. Further, the importance of ensuring that law enforcement officers have met their in-service training requirement is the difference to the successful defense of an officer in litigation.

With a growing list of job duties, an ever-growing workforce to train, and constrained budgetary resources, he knows it is imperative for the organization to automate its training processes to ensure officers are in compliance with state mandates.

The legacy system ILEA had in place managed course registration, but the academy needed a much more comprehensive system that went beyond class registration. It needed to migrate its core training management processes from labor-intensive and costly paper systems to an automated solution. This allowed ILEA to develop uniform and repeatable processes across the ILEA campus. This vision for transformation encompassed the seamless integration of student registration, training management, automated testing, dormitory management, and electronic capture of mandated in-service training.