NEW YORK _ New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's son Dante on Monday recalled the terrifying moment when he believed that someone called the police on him just a few years after being coached by his father on how to interact with police as a black teen.
During a trip to California when he was 18, Dante went on a late-night walk in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, he wrote in an op-ed for USA Today on Monday. Dante described forgetting the code to his friend's apartment and standing outside for 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get in when a police cruiser arrived around 1 a.m.
"I figured it must be heading somewhere else, but no, it pulled over right in front of me," Dante, now 21, wrote. "For years, I had been aware of the fear I caused as a young black man _ I had seen people cross the street to avoid me, I had been followed around stores _ yet I could still hardly believe someone thought that I was trying to break into a home. But the truth was obvious: Somebody had called the police on me."
Dante said he began to panic, frantically typing in the code correctly � "so fast that the cops didn't even have a chance to step out of the car to question me."
"My fear in that moment meant that I wasn't even going to give them the chance," he wrote.
Dante, who graduated Yale University earlier this year, penned the op-ed after de Blasio was criticized for describing "the talk" he had with Dante on how to act around police officers during last week's presidential primary debate.
"There's something that sets me apart from all my colleagues running in this race, and that is, for the last 21 years, I have been raising a black son in America," de Blasio said. "And I have had to have very, very serious talks with my son, Dante, about how to protect himself on the streets of our city and all over this country, including 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, too, as we saw recently in Indiana."
The comment was immediately blasted by Police Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch, who said police face a "hostile and dangerous environment" because of "the demonization of cops by de Blasio" and others.
The mayor also described the conversation in December 2014 after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict the police officer who put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold. At the time, Lynch said de Blasio "threw cops under the bus."
Dante wrote that his white father and two black cousins had "the talk" with him when he was 13-years-old on a trip to Atlanta. They told him to "be extra police and deliberate" when speaking to cops and "don't try to be funny or casual."
De Blasio and the cousins told Dante to also avoid "sudden movements, back talking, reaching for anything, even your wallet, without telling the officer what you're about to do."
The consequences of a "small mistake," Dante was told, could be "getting arrested or maybe even shot."
Dante said his fear when cops were called on him just a few years later "is not unique."
"That lecture I got from my father and cousins has been given to countless young black people. 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," Dante wrote. "We shouldn't need to feel that fear."
The PBA declined to comment.
