May 23, 2023
Honoring Amy St. Pierre's Legacy, An Op-Ed by Shannon Cofrin Gaggero
After our beloved member Amy St. Pierre was lost to a mass shooting in Atlanta, the incident was used by local officials to promote regressive policing. Solidaire’s Shannon Cofrin Gaggero published a powerful opinion piece to counter the narrative titled, My friend Amy was killed in the Midtown Atlanta mass shooting, and she would call for gun control, not policing.
Our community is already reeling and grieving from the loss of our beloved Amy. There is a compounding hurt of having to bear witness to her death being used to support Mayor Dickens’ regressive vision of public safety, a vision Amy did not share.
The Atlanta Mayor published an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) using the tragic shooting to support the massively unpopular Cop City, which Amy passionately opposed. Shannon’s piece was published in the Atlanta Community Press Collective, an abolitionist, not-for-profit media collective who Atlanta Solidaire members helped launch. Timothy Pratt quoted her article in The Guardian who highlighted that “the AJC has only run one editorial in nearly two years of public protest that even questions the [Cop City] project.”
If the Mayor truly wants to honor Amy St. Pierre, he will stop using her death as an excuse for increased policing and surveillance. But I don’t expect Mayor Dickens to listen. This administration has proven themselves to be antagonistic toward the public. So I hope you join me, as community members, in advancing Amy’s vision of a safer, more just society by advocating for common sense gun laws and investments in housing, education, health care and social services. We can achieve her vision of public safety, together.
