Dante De Blasio Details 'The Talk' Mayor Gave Him About Police

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio's son offered details Monday about "the talk" his father gave him about interacting with police as a black teenager — and his own frightening experience with the cops.

In a USA Today op-ed, Dante de Blasio, who is biracial, gave new dimensions to a story his father invoked on the presidential debate stage last week, a move that sparked criticism from New York City's largest police union.

Dante de Blasio wrote that his white father and two of his black cousins sat him down when he was 13 to instruct him on how to talk to the police. They advised him to be "extra polite" and avoid sudden movements, as even a small misstep could get him arrested or shot, the younger de Blasio wrote.

"I remember them awkwardly looking at each other, searching for the best way to convey the gravity of the situation, until I spoke up and said, 'You don’t need to keep telling me. I know what can happen,'" Dante de Blasio wrote. "Even then, not long after the murder of Trayvon Martin but still years before the deaths of Eric Garner and so many others, I had heard the stories enough times."

De Blasio also detailed a brush with the police in San Francisco that scared him when he was 18. He was struggling to enter the code to get into a family friend's apartment around 1 a.m. when a police cruiser approached, apparently because someone had called the cops on him, he says.

He said he had not been afraid walking through the city's Tenderloin neighborhood, where a man was shouting at passersby and people were doing drugs out in the open. But the police car's presence motivated him to enter the code correctly so the cops couldn't question him, he wrote.

"That lecture I got from my father and cousins has been given to countless young black people," he wrote. "We're taught to fear the people meant to protect us, because the absolute worst-case scenario has happened too many times. This reality cannot continue."

Bill de Blasio brought up his talk with Dante during last week's presidential debate to make a point about how the city has driven down crime amid its efforts to improve relations between the police and communities.

He said he talked with his son about "how to deal with the fact that he has to take special caution because there have been too many tragedies between our young men and our police."

The mayor's comments harkened back to a speech he made in December 2014 after a grand jury declined to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner. The officer, Daniel Pantaleo, still works for the NYPD and just faced an internal disciplinary trial in connection with Garner's death this year.

The mayor's comments five years ago drew fire from the New York City Police Benevolent Association, which criticized the mayor last week for bringing up the story again.

"Mayor de Blasio has apparently learned nothing over the past six years about the extremely damaging impact of anti-police rhetoric on both cops and the communities we serve," PBA President Pat Lynch said in a statement.

De Blasio stood by his decision to discuss his talks with Dante and accused the police union's leadership of using "divisive tactics."

"If I can play a role in helping people in this country to understand why millions and millions of parents have had to have that conversation, I think it’s a good thing to bring out in the open and really discuss and make sense of," the mayor said at an unrelated news conference last week.