Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence

and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists,

community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas

or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question

at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

This week, Public Health On Call commemorates one year after the murder of George Floyd,

with five podcast episodes produced in

collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. Each podcast explores

a dimension of the work ahead to eliminate racism in all of its forms. Today's guest

host is Dr. Rachel Thornton, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

and the Associate Director for Policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. Dr. Thornton.

Thank you so much, Josh. It's wonderful to be here. Today, we are going to examine the link

between voting rights, civic participation, and achieving

meaningful policing reform in local communities.

Since the murder of George Floyd one year ago, we have seen record voter turnout for the

U.S. presidential election, an attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,

aimed at undermining the U.S. democratic process to certify the results of the presidential

election, and an onslaught of legislative initiatives to limit voting rights in states across the U.S.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, state voting bills tracker,

...