State Rep. Park Cannon is placed in the back of a Georgia State Capitol patrol car after being arrested at the Georgia State Capitol Building. Cannon was arrested after she tried knocking on the door of Governor Brian Kemp’s office while he was speaking after she signed a major Republican-sponsored revision of the state election. Hide Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa Pointer / Atlanta Journal-Constitution over AP caption
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Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa Pointer / Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
State Rep. Park Cannon is placed in the back of a Georgia State Capitol patrol car after being arrested at the Georgia State Capitol Building. Cannon was arrested after she tried knocking on the door of Governor Brian Kemp’s office while he was speaking after she signed a major Republican-sponsored revision of the state election.
Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa Pointer / Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
Repeated knock on the office door Georgia governor Brian Kemp arrested a lawmaker in the capital on Thursday.
Democratic MP Park Cannon, a black woman, kept knocking on Kemp’s office door after Georgia State Patrol officers ordered her to stop.
Cannon is charged with obstructing law enforcement officers through threats or violence, and she is charged with disrupting general assembly or other members’ meetings.
It is unclear what was said between Cannon and a police officer guarding Governor Kemp’s office door.
Several videos of the incident posted online clearly show arrest officers being repeatedly informed that Cannon was a state legislature.
While she is being dragged away, Cannon identifies herself as a Georgia state lawmaker and demands to know why she is being arrested.
In one video she yells, “There is no reason for me to be arrested. I am a lawmaker!”
Other officials then come to prevent the onlookers from interfering. You eventually bring a screaming cannon back and forth into a Georgia State Capitol squad car.
Cannon is 5’2 “according to her Arrest Protocol. Her arrest by several major white police officers and the picture she was being brought through the Capitol resulted in widespread condemnation on social media overnight. And her arrest has led to comparisons with protests against civil rights and police brutality starting this summer as well as those of the 1960s.
The Georgian Constitution states that the legislature “should be free from arrest” during the sessions of the General Assembly, with the exception of treason, crime or the breach of the peace.
Cannon was charged and taken to a local prison. She was released around 11 p.m., according to her attorney Gerald A. Griggs, who spoke to a group of reporters and supporters outside the prison.
Griggs told the crowd that Cannon had bruised from her arrest. He was escorted outside of prison by Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, who was visiting Cannon in prison. He told the group that he is also Cannon’s pastor.
Warnock said of Cannon, “She’s understandably a little shaken by what happened to her. She doesn’t deserve it.”
The Senator questioned what made Cannon’s actions “so dangerous” that her arrest was warranted.
Cannon tweeted early Friday thanking her supporters, saying, “I’m not the first Georgian woman arrested for fighting voter suppression. I would like to say I’ll be the last, but we know that that’s not true. “
Griggs said The charges will be brought against them Thursday night and they intend to fight them.
The bill, signed by Kemp on Thursday, includes new postal voting restrictions, extends most voters’ access to early personal elections, and ends a month-long battle to vote in a battlefield state.
It has been heavily criticized as a bill that would result in the disenfranchisement of black voters. It is also seen as a reprimand to Republicans for the November and January elections, in which the state’s black voters led the election of two Democrats to the Senate.
