A.J. Werfelmann, 51, recently retired after 25 years of serving as a reserve officer with the Mountlake Terrace Police Department. The Marysville resident works full-time as a senior operations manager for retail with Brookfield Properties, and he also volunteered on weekends as a reserve police officer.

Werfelmann said he first developed an interest in working for law enforcement as a teen while volunteering in Junction City, Oregon’s police explorer program. He then served in the U.S. Navy for more than six years and planned on using that experience to get hired on with law enforcement afterward.

When Werfelmann, who at one point had been stationed in Everett, got out of the Navy and began looking for such a job, he noted, “everybody wanted to be a police officer at the time,” and many agencies had raised their hiring requirements. “Going into law enforcement full time, they wanted to have people that had four-year degrees or at least a two-year degree and two years of military experience, or something like that,” he said. “So I wasn’t quite at the point that coming straight out of the military, I could get hired on at a reputable police department.

But having been a police explorer, Werfelmann was familiar with reserve officer programs that allow volunteers to serve. He learned the Mountlake Terrace Police Department was hiring for reserve officers and obtained the position with the goal of getting his college degree to become a police officer.

However, while attending school, Werfelmann said he “started moving up the corporate ladder” in what turned out to be a career path in business management. “I decided to just kind of have my cake and eat it too,” he noted. “Have a good career, and still be able to enjoy doing the law enforcement side of things in helping people” by continuing to serve as a reserve officer.

Werfelmann said that after being in the military, he particularly enjoyed in the reserve program the sense of camaraderie he experienced “working with the person beside you and kind of building those bonds.”

Reserve officers are required to serve a minimum of 20 hours per month with the police department, but Werfelmann usually far exceeded that number. “I was the first one to break the 100-hour mark in a month,” he noted, and typically averaged between 50-80 hours monthly. “As time went on I probably didn’t put in quite as many hours, but pretty much up to the point that I retired I was still doing 30-50 hours” each month.

“Even as a reserve, I had to at that time, we went through the same type of training that you’d have to go through at the full-time academy,” Werfelmann said. “We had to still take the same civil service test that full-timers had to – the guys that were actually getting paid hourly” for their police work.

After approximately two years spent field training and working with Mountlake Terrace PD, he obtained solo reserve status. “Essentially, I was working the road by myself in a patrol car,” Werfelmann added. “Being a reserve, I could either work by myself or I could team up with somebody and work in another car with another officer.”

He mostly volunteered on Friday and Saturday nights because those are traditionally considered the busiest times. And when Werfelmann had extra time off from his day job, he would often work additional shifts at the police department throughout the week.

“Everybody has a hobby and I guess you could kind of say this was a little bit of my hobby, just because it’s something that I enjoyed,” Werfelmann said. “I could fill in, there were times too where if we were short-handed I could come in and cover a shift if need be as well.”

Chief Pete Caw was a patrol sergeant with the Mountlake Terrace Police Department when he first met Werfelmann, who often worked on Caw’s patrol crew. He said that while it is common for departments to have reserve positions, they are often limited to riding along with other officers and restricted in the duties they are allowed to perform when responding to situations.

But with Werfelmann, he never saw it that way. “I always thought he was my equal as a police officer and I still do in terms of what he could do and how he can handle people,” Caw said. He added there were “many times, even though he’s a reserve officer and I’m the chief, I would seek him out and ask him to get advice on issues that I was dealing with — I trust his judgment that much.”

Caw reported that a number of years ago, there was a new full-time officer at the department who was struggling a bit. So one of the sergeants told him to ride along with Werfelmann and “watch how he does this job and emulate him to a certain degree,” Caw said. “I think that’s a great story, we take a reserve officer and use him as an example of what we’d like a regular officer to become and that’s a great compliment to A.J.”

After a quarter-century of serving as a reserve officer, Werfelmann decided the time was right to hang up his badge.

“Most officers retire around 52 years of age, I was going to be 51, and unfortunately just the environment around law enforcement kind of drove me to that,” he said. “As a reserve, you’re not exactly afforded the same protection that a full-time officer is, you don’t have a union to back you. And so just with the current climate, the political climate, it just kind of came down to I’m within a year of when I said I was going to start looking at retiring from doing it and really I have a lot to lose if I make a good faith effort on something and somebody goes a different direction with it.”

He described his choice as “a pretty difficult decision to make because I really enjoyed working for the department and enjoyed working for the citizens of Mountlake Terrace. But, you know, even good things must come to an end.”

Caw said volunteer officers are increasingly becoming “kind of a relic of the past. I’ve abolished the reserve program here because in today’s environment it’s just asking a lot for people to do this for nothing” other than a small stipend, which he likened to “Christmas money.” He added, “It really is donated time,” and Werfelmann “gave us hundreds and hundreds of hours” over the years.

“I hate to see him go,” Caw said, “but 25 years is a long time to donate time to the community.”

Werfelmann said he’ll miss the community relationships he developed while serving in Mountlake Terrace. “Working for 25 years in the city you get to know people, anything from the mayor, council members, just general people you interact with on the street on a normal basis,” he added.

Caw said that Werfelmann has a natural ability for police work. “I’ve told him this many times, but I wish he’d have taken that direction in life and became a full-time police officer because he has that gift,” Caw added. “But he’s got a really good job, he makes quite a bit of money what he’s doing, and he takes time off from that to help us so that’s admirable.”

Werfelmann said his favorite moments in uniform were spent working at special events, such as parades, and also developing connections within the local community. “I really enjoyed socializing with the people that lived in Mountlake Terrace, or that have come to the Tour de Terrace, and making friends with shop owners either through being called there or just through regular community-oriented policing (by) going in and getting a bite to eat and talking to the owners and getting to know them a little more,” he said. “That was the fun part.”

Since retiring from the reserve officer position, Werfelmann said that he’s still trying to figure out what to do with approximately 20 hours of additional free time on weekends. “Fridays come along and it’s like I’m going home, OK, what do normal people do on a Friday or Saturday night?” But, he added, “I got a house and stuff, so I got enough to keep me busy.”

Even though the Marysville resident will no longer be reporting for law enforcement duties in Mountlake Terrace, he plans on maintaining some of his other ties to the community. “I still go to my barber and there’s a restaurant I go to down there quite often because I’ve known the owner for a while,” Werfelmann said. “So I’ll still be poking my nose into the city periodically. Plus, I was told by other members of the (police) department that I got to come here and say hi.”

He added that he will particularly miss working alongside the various personnel he’s developed a camaraderie with over the years. “South County, Lynnwood, Edmonds, (and) Mountlake Terrace I feel are some of the best trained more down-to-earth officers that I have had the pleasure of working with, which in today’s day and age, that’s saying a lot,” Werfelmann noted. “But it’s 100% truthful. I made a lot of friends over the years in the law enforcement field from all the departments and I’m going to miss that aspect of it.”

— By Nathan Blackwell