Really, Now? Cop Who Arrested Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon for Knocking on Governor's Door Claims Events of Jan. 6 Were on His Mind

The last time I wrote about the arrogance of white people, arrogant white people demanded I retract the statement or else they would be even more arrogant and racist.

So today, I’m taking a different tack and instead talking about the audacity of whiteness, as exemplified by the Georgia state patrol officer who arrested state Rep. Park Cannon last Thursday for the crime of knocking on Gov. Brian Kemp’s door as he signed a racist voter suppression bill into law.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Lt. G.D. Langford, the officer seen on video grabbing Cannon after she calmly rapped on a wooden door in the state legislature where she works, filed an incident report in which he claims he instigated the arrest of Cannon because he was fearful of something like the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol unfolding.

“The events of January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol were in the back of my mind,” Langford wrote in the report obtained by AJC. “I believed Cannon’s actions of obstructing law enforcement in front of agitated protestors to constitute a breach of the peace.”

Yes, this officer is audacious enough to reference a Republican-led attack on democracy—in which five people died and law enforcement present at the scene let almost all of the insurrectionists go without booking them for arrest—in his decision to drag a Black elected official away in cuffs because she dared to try and shine a public spotlight on the Republican Party’s present-day Jim Crow maneuverings.

It never ceases to amaze me how eager police are to carry out their most clairvoyant “law-enforcing” skills when it comes to finding Black people’s actions suspicious, despite routinely bending over backwards to give white people the benefit of the doubt even when they are explicitly signaling and exhibiting violence.

Also, how is it that white people behaved badly in Washington, D.C., and a Black representative in Georgia is then treated with suspicion as a result of their behavior?

Ain’t that some shit?

To further establish the outrageous claim that the Black state representative was on the brink of leading some kind of domestic terrorist attack, one of Langford’s fellow officers wrote that he locked Kemp’s office in response to Cannon’s knock and evacuated the governor and first lady from the room “as the side door was shaking so violently, he felt it would be breached.”

Come on now.

Another cop claimed that the people present with Cannon at the statehouse during the signing of the bill were “attempting to breach the wooden doors” that she was knocking on.

Of course, no video evidence of this has been forthcoming, and witnesses who were there told AJC no such thing happened.

Cannon has been charged with two felonies—disruption of the General Assembly and obstruction of law enforcement.