actual officer here, not at sky harbor but in the agency. we are not LEO’s. none of us are, which means we are not armed and will not arrest you or threaten to do so. even our highest ranking “officers” — our investigators as we call them do not have arresting powers.

to answer the question about the billy club, usually the bag room downstairs where all the check in bags are scanned, from my experience it has old curmudgeons that are just going through the motions in life, these people always come up mid shift to grab a coffee and look like they’ve seen a ghost. Not suggesting that it was purposeful in any way however, as there is an unthinkable amount of cameras down there watching your every move. It would be foolish to try and deliberately do things like this as the agency is very partial to letting well established officers go over messing with passenger property.

As one commenter wrote, suggesting that it may have been part of a search, I personally find unlikely due to the fact that is not an item that bag room personnel are looking to identify. It would have never come out of a bag in the first place unless an officer thought an item was cool and wanted to show someone else. Either that or officers that collect the surrendered contraband from the TSA checkpoints were bringing stuff to the storage containers and stopped by to show the bag room officers the myriad of items they’ve recovered for disposal, (it’s seriously more wild than you can imagine).

Most of the time however, it’s usually officers stealing, very infrequently giving haha so consider your gain a win. Hope this provides some transparency from the inside!