In wake of police shootings, Dallas looks ahead
Mike Rawlings, the mayor of Dallas, has been busy reflecting on the past few days.
"I was nervous, because early on we thought there were multiple shooters...and to get to the bottom of it that this was a lone shooter relieved me a little bit," Rawlings told "48 Hours"' Maureen Maher.
Still, the investigation into Thursday's ambush is ongoing. Saturday afternoon, a live round of ammunition was recovered just inside the perimeter of the crime scene.
"What comes next now for the city -- this isn't a city that has a reputation of police issues with the community?" Maher asked Rawlings.
"The first thing we have to do is we have to mourn correctly," the mayor replied. "This next week there will be days of mourning."
There will be lots of funerals.
"We have five funerals, the president is going to be coming in. Through that mourning process dialogue starts to happen and that helps us as a city," Rawlings said.
"The city has become forever changed and so it turned everything inside out and upside down," said Malik Aziz, deputy chief of police in Dallas and chair of the National Black Police Association.
African American officers make up a quarter of the city's police force. Dallas has had a well-known community policing program in place since the early 1990s.
"I believe Dallas offers a very progressive model for community engagement and community policing," he told Maher. "We've had town hall meetings, we open our dialogue, we have open transparency with our community members even though we can agree to disagree."
"It almost seems unfair then, or unfathomable, that Dallas would be the city that has this specific king of shooting incident," Maher noted.
"The 800,000 police officers in 18,000 police departments -- we are not monolithic, we are not actually the same, we do things very different," Aziz said. "Sometimes policing is not pretty, it's ugly ... but it shouldn't ever be brutal."
Dallas pastors and police chaplains Karen Hollie-Thibodeaux and David Thibodeaux are also among those working to move forward, planning a march for peace next weekend.
"We are here to unite the community, that we're all together. What affects one, affects us all. We want to come to the precinct here to let them know we're with them, we're behind them," said David Thibodeaux.
And they spent today walking the talk, including frank discussions about race at a local barbershop.
"We need to all come together, I still see racists among our people, my people, in y'all's people," said one patron.
"We have to try to fix the problem and not add to the problem," said another.
And problem solving is on the mayor's mind.
"You're out there in the spotlight, how do you quell the violence and the anger?" Maher asked.
"I think there's a lot of violent beliefs that have already been quelled by the death of five individuals -- that makes you sit up and take notice. But I think you've got to also make sure that you listen more," said the mayor.