City mayors offer views on race relations in America

A CBS News poll found that 43 percent of blacks feel mostly anxious about the presence of police in their community. It's a clear indicator that much work needs to be done to help bridge the divide between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of that work will fall on the shoulders of politicians - the mayors of American cities.

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley brought up the issue to four mayors: Mayor Lester Taylor of East Orange, NJ, Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle, Washington, Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson of Gary, Indiana, and Mayor Carlos Gimenez of Miami-Dade County.

"Tell me why a perfectly law abiding and reasonable African-American man feels a chill when he encounters a white police officers?" Pelley asked the group.

The answer is tied to how society views people of color, according to Mayor Taylor.

"Whether I'm wearing a suit, whether I'm wearing my Timberland boots...there's a perception, in many of our communities across the country, that African-Americans may be criminals. And that's something that we have to dispel across racial lines," said Taylor.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray thinks it's too easy to simply blame police officers for the issues that keep popping up.

(Watch full interview, at left.)

"I actually think it's a fault of systems and leaders who are not addressing issues and who are not sending a clear message about what is acceptable -- what you can and you can't do out there," said Murray.

The conversation shifted to less-talked about roots of the problem: unemployment and education.

"We got to deal with the disparities in education. We got to deal with the poverty rates in our cities," said Freeman-Wilson. "We have to be willing to cut to the core of some deep-seeded, long-standing issues around race, if we are really going to prevent the next Ferguson throughout the country."