Former police officer and Easton resident Sean Reifel<\/a>, who resigned and had his last day at the department on May 20, was the first contestant eliminated from the Peacock dating show\u2019s eighth season.<\/p>\nChief Michelle Kott and Mayor J. William Reynolds, the latter of whom swore Reifel in in August, previously criticized his departure as the police department works to fill vacancies.<\/p>\n
Footage of the show\u2019s first \u201cAftersun\u201d segment appears to show Reifel reading Reynolds\u2019 comments.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess he\u2019s upset. That\u2019s interesting,\u201d Reifel said on the show. \u201cI definitely had to sit down with my job and told them exactly where I was going and what was happening, and they asked me to put in for unpaid leave. And my sister commented on it \u2026 \u2018This could have been a great opportunity for the mayor and police department to connect with the community. Instead, they chose a response that will likely reinforce the stereotypes they should be working to change.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n
Reifel went on to say in the footage that \u201cit does bother me because they, just before I left, gave me awards for, with my partners, taking a lady out of a building on fire and talking someone off a roof that was mentally ill. So it\u2019s like, to give me those and then do something like this, I just don\u2019t understand. I don\u2019t want to say anything bad about them, like I know things can be taken out of context. Everyone in the department knew where I was going.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former Bethlehem police officer has responded to the criticism he received for leaving the department to join…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":214589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154,1391,1681,182,883,139,434,28,50,289,432],"class_list":["post-219860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-bethlehem-area","tag-entertainment","tag-local-news","tag-local-politics","tag-news","tag-northampton-county","tag-pennsylvania","tag-politics","tag-things-to-do","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}