Here's how this 17-year-old New Yorker is changing school safety one borough at a time.

In The Know by Yahoo
Updated

Alliyah Logan may be just 17-years-old, but she's making waves in New York City as she fights to improve school safety for her community. From leading protests to organizing rallies, here is how Alliyah is fighting to limit police presence on schools across her city.

Video Transcript

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ALLIYAH LOGAN: So for me, I've always said this, that I've been a leader that my community has been waiting for. I'm looking at the intersections of different issues because it's evident in New York City that zip codes define whether or not communities can be safe or can have access to safety.

Hi. My name is Alliyah Logan. I'm a Jamaican American Youth Advocate from the Bronx. I focus a lot of my activism on empowering black youth. Even in elementary school or middle school, I was used to, like, people breaking out in fights every day, there being police officers and metal detectors. In middle school, the amount of violence that we were just used to in our everyday life, like having a fight was just common. Having your, like, classmates get shot was very common.

But now I go to high school in Manhattan, more specifically Soho, so it was a very drastic change going into a high school that was predominantly white and predominantly, like, higher socioeconomic status. So my activism was really driven by just the small interactions with my different peers at school. And they never experienced gun violence in the way that I have had or in the way that my community has.

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