Officer Robert Joyce is the latest addition to the Sedona Police Department after graduating from the Northern Arizona Regional Training Academy on Dec. 12, along with Officer Elizabeth Pedroza.

Joyce was previously a police service technician for the Saint Charles Police Department, a suburb located about 20 miles west of St. Louis, from January 2006 to July 2019.

“[I] got lucky in the stock market and crypto market, so I had some money, so I retired, and then I missed it,” Joyce said. “I started looking for departments where I wanted to work … I didn’t want to work at a huge department … so Sedona was my first choice.”

Joyce was born in Tulsa, Okla., in 1982. His father Ted worked in insurance and his mother Janice was a teacher for younger grades before working for a phone company and eventually becoming a homemaker for Robert and his older sister.

The family later lived in Nashville, Tenn., where he said he discovered a love of ice hockey at age 8, and baseball.

“I’ve always been into cars and I always went to the drag strip outside St Louis,” said Joyce, who owns a 1970 Corvette.

“I moved to Vegas in September 2021 [after I] sold my house in Missouri and moved out to Vegas to play poker,” Joyce said. He added that he also spent his first retirement traveling throughout the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Joyce and his girlfriend Jessica Vargas, a Las Vegas-based photographer, met at a Las Vegas restaurant in March 2022 and would later vacation in Sedona.

Joyce said the mental challenges of poker drew him to the game and that the ability to set his own schedule was the best part of doing it professionally.

“I knew I could make a living based on the money I was making as an amateur playing it on my days off,” Joyce said. “It’s a mind game … The crazy thing about poker is you can play a hand perfectly and still lose the hand because you don’t know what cards are coming on the flop.”

Joyce said that he expected the experience of learning patience and how to understand body language from poker to translate to police work.

“In law enforcement you have to have patience because you’re dealing with people, a lot of times on their worst day,” he said. “So you got to try to put yourself in their shoes and somewhat to understand, you know, that they’re they called you for a reason,” Joyce said. He added that he got good at picking up on people’s tells at the poker table, such as one man’s habit of slightly adjusting his seat every time he was dealt a great hand.

“There’s a difference between somebody being nervous because they were pulled over by the police,” Joyce said. “But somebody that’s fidgety and they [shy] away from you when they get their information. So instead of just grabbing it out of their center console, they’re acting like they’re almost trying to hide something they don’t want you to see. There’s a very visual cue that you probably need to get this guy out checking for weapons or something, because there’s something going on. That’s not normal behavior on a traffic stop. Most of what you [pick up] is not what they’re saying … it’s body language and I learned that from poker.”

Joyce said his short-term goals in his new job would be passing his field training, to “start making a legacy and a name for myself as a reliable and great officer … and then long-term, move up the chain of command or into specialty positions like detective or narcotics, those both interest me.”

As of Jan. 6, SPD has 27 sworn officers for 30 budgeted positions, and 13 of the officers have been with SPD longer than five years.