The cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have sparked "a long overdue" conversation about race and police interaction, Minneapolis police Chief Janeé Harteau said in an interview this week with CBS News.

The interview can be found here (an extended version is also available online).

"People are frustrated (and) rightfully so," Harteau told CBS reporter Jeff Pegues. "What's positive I think is that we're having a national conversation about race relations and police, and frankly it's a long overdue conversation."

The interview, which also included the police chiefs of Milwaukee, Houston and Charlotte, touched on the national unrest in the wake of the recent grand jury decisions not to indict white officers in New York and Ferguson, Missouri in the deaths of Brown and Garner. A new CBS poll found that 54 percent of blacks say they've been unfairly targeted by the police.

"Now I'm not saying that police officers are racist by nature, but the situation can enhance biases after you're hear on the job," said Houston police Chief Charles McClelland. "If you're a police officer and you work in certain neighborhoods and certain communities, and the people you're arresting look a certain way, behave a certain way it's easy for someone to get stereotyped."

Milwaukee police Chief Edward Flynn, whose comments on race and crime recently went viral, defended criminal profiling as a legal and a useful police tool, citing statistics that point to disproportionately larger numbers of blacks tied to violent crime in his city.

Another CBS poll showed that 61 percent of Americans say that police need better training.

"I think there's always opportunities to improve our training. What we expect in our police officers is different than what we expected them to do 30 years ago," Harteau said. The ability to communicate: we're in the people business. We have to be able to communicate, it's our number one tool."