Elizabeth Pedroza is one of two new officers who joined the Sedona Police Department this month. She started on Dec. 22 alongside new hire Robert Joyce.
Officer Kevin Hudspeth, a 19-year veteran of the SPD, retired Dec. 23.
“I want to be here to serve the community,” Pedroza said. “I’m soaking up the knowledge from the people that I work with [so] that I’m able to perform and that I will have their backs when they need me, and vice versa … It seems like the community already has a good relationship with [SPD], and I’m hoping to continue that and help them improve on that relationship.”
Until June, Pedroza served in the U.S. Air Force’s 56th Security Forces Squadron at Luke Air Force Base in Maricopa County, departing with the rank of staff sergeant as a military dog handler. She graduated from the Northern Arizona Regional Training Academy on Dec. 12.
“When I joined the Air Force, I became a cop for them, or they call it security forces, with the primary goal of being a dog handler,” Pedroza said. “So I was a regular cop for them for three years, and then I applied to the K-9 program, got picked up, went to this course, and then got stationed at Luke, and I fell in love with the job, and I knew it’s what I wanted to do on the outside.”
Pedroza enlisted after her 2012 graduation from Palo Verde High School in Blythe, Calif., where she was born and raised, and remains in the Air Force Reserves.
“Our day-in, day-out job consists of patrolling around the base, finding different areas to search, whether it be looking for substances or looking for people that aren’t supposed to be here,” Pedroza said in a February United States Air Force recruiting video talking about her dog. “We have fun together. One of her favorite pastimes is to catch flies. She doesn’t eat them. She just holds them in her mouth and then lets them buzz a little bit, and then she lets them go.”
Pedroza’s extended family remains in Blythe, including her mother and father, who became naturalized U.S. citizens around 1995 after immigrating from Baja California, Mexico.
“How Blythe made me was that I had a lot of family there,” Pedroza said. “My dad has seven brothers and sisters, so I have a lot of cousins … I spent a lot of my time with my family, or out on the river, or rivers, during the summer. During the winters, thankfully, my dad had quads and sandrails, so we would go out in the desert and go get lost for a bit.”
In 2023, Pedroza married her wife Alexus. The couple have an 11-year old son, Milo.
“I think the biggest challenge has just being away from home, because I stayed in the dorms during the academy, so having the wife have to manage the house, the kiddo, the dogs, it was a lot,” Pedroza said.
“A typical day off [is] mainly spending time with family, going to the gym and seeing what new adventures the family, and I can get into we’re big on going to different places,” Pedroza said. “Recently it’s a lot of Christmas lights … the last one we went to was Desert Farm Lights in Surprise.”
She said that her long-term goals would include eventually working with a K-9 again, saying that the experience taught her adaptability because different dogs responded differently to instruction.
“They’re going to surprise you, something’s going to come out of left field, and you’re going to have learn a new way to go about approaching something,” Pedroza said.
