Video recordings of police officers battering or even murdering unarmed

black citizens have validated longstanding complaints by AfricanAmericans and changed the way the country views the issue of police
brutality. Police officers who might once have felt free to arrest or assault
black citizens for no cause and explain it away later have been put on
notice that the truth could be revealed by a cellphone video posted on the
Internet.
This kind of public scrutiny is all to the good, given the damage police
brutality has done to African-American communities for generations and
the corrosive effect it has on the broader society. Yet the peeling away of
secrecy on these indisputably unconstitutional practices is now being
challenged by politicians who want to soft-pedal or even ignore police
misconduct while attacking the people who expose it or raise their voices
in protest against it. This trend is like something straight out of Orwell.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey the increasingly desperate presidential
candidate who is going nowhere fast took this posture on Sunday when
he accused President Obama of encouraging lawlessness and violence
against police officers by acknowledging that the country needed to take
both police brutality and the Black Lives Matter protest movement
seriously.
The president is absolutely right. This movement focuses on the
irrefutable fact that black citizens are far more likely than whites to die at
the hands of the police. The more the country ignores that truth, the
greater the civic discord that will flow from it.
The recent remarks of James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, were not as racially poisonous as Mr. Christies, but they
were no less incendiary. In a speech at the University of Chicago Law
School on Friday, Mr. Comey said that heightened scrutiny of police
behavior and fear of appearing in viral videos was leading officers
to avoid confrontations with suspects. This, he said, may have contributed
to an increase in crime.
There is no data suggesting such an effect, and certainly Mr. Comey has
none. But his suggestion plays into the right-wing view that holding the
police to constitutional standards endangers the public. Justice
Department officials who have made a top priority of prosecuting police
departments for civil rights violations and who dispute that heightened
scrutiny of the police drives up crime were understandably angry at Mr.
Comeys speculations.
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Doug
6 minutes ago
As a former police officer, I can say AMEN to this editorial. You are exactly
on point. Comey is wrong, and Christie is, well, Christie. ...
Boyfromnj
8 minutes ago
What Comey should have said more clearly is that, if police feel that they
don't have a community's support, police MAY be less compelled to...
Old blue
8 minutes ago
Police who are resisted in a non-violent way have to learn to respond in a
nonviolent way. "Mouthing off" and other forms of disrespect does...

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His formulation implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to
have free rein to be abusive. It also implies that the public would be safer
if Americans with cellphones never started circulating videos of officers
battering suspects in the first place.
A day after Mr. Comey made his remarks, The Times published a lengthy
investigationinto racial profiling and abusive police behavior in
Greensboro, N.C., the third-largest city in the state. After reviewing tens
of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest data, Times reporters
found that the police pulled over African-American drivers at a rate far out
of proportion to their share of the local driving population. The police
searched black motorists or their cars twice as often as whites even

though whites where significantly more likely to be caught with drugs and
weapons.
Greensboro police officers were more likely to pull black drivers over for
no reason and more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when
the driver offered no physical resistance. A black Greensboro man who
nearly lost his job as a result of asking an officer why he was being
ordered out of his car during a nightmarish encounter said: Every time I
see a police officer, I get a cold chill. Even if I needed one, I wouldnt call
one.
This is the kind of treatment that some Americans routinely face at the
hands of their police departments. Mr. Comeys speculations about alleged
pressure on officers to stand down shows that he hasnt begun to grasp
the nature of the problem.
A version of this editorial appears in print on October 27, 2015, on page
A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Political Lies About Police
Brutality. Today's Paper|Subscribe

Valeant Pharmaceuticals is a sleazy company.

Although it existed as a relatively small company before 2010, it did a deal that
year that put it on the map. The deal was with Biovail, one of Canadas largest
drugmakers and a company that had run afoul of the Securities and Exchange
Commission.
In 2008, the S.E.C. sued Biovail for repeatedly overstating earnings and actively
misleading investors. Biovail settled the case for $10 million.
As it happens, 2008 was the same year that a management consultant named J.
Michael Pearson became Valeants chief executive. Pearson had an unusual
idea about how to grow a modern pharmaceutical company. The pharma business
model has long called for a hefty percentage of revenue to be spent on company
scientists who try to develop new drugs. The failure rate is high but a successful
new drug can generate over $1 billion in annual revenue, which makes up for a lot
of failures.

Joe Nocera
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Pearson didnt have much patience for research and development. And while he
certainly wanted moneymaking drugs, he didnt really need blockbusters to make
his business model work. His plan was to acquire pharmaceutical companies, fire
most of their scientists and jack up the price of their drugs. Biovail gave him the
heft to put his plan in action.
And so he has done, to the delight of Valeants shareholders, and the dismay of
most everyone else.
Before Pearson took control of Valeant, it spent 14 percent of its revenue developing
new drugs. Last year, that number was under 3 percent. Meanwhile, Pearson has
been ruthless about price hikes; in February, according to The Wall Street Journal,
the company raised the price of one heart drug by 525 and another by 212 percent
on the very day it acquired the rights to the drugs. Complaints from patients,
doctors and insurance companies have prompted investigations by federal
prosecutors in Massachusetts and New York.

In the seven years Pearson has run the company, Valeant has done more than 100
deals. Its growth has been supercharged, and so has its stock price. Pearson has
become a billionaire.
Fast forward to Oct. 19. During a conference call with investors, Valeant disclosed a
relationship with a specialty pharmacy called Philidor RX Services, a relationship in
which Philidor seemingly does business with no one besides Valeant, and that is so
close that Valeant consolidates Philidors financials while holding Philidors inventory
on its books. During the call, Valeant also disclosed that it had paid for an option to
buy Philidor, though it had not actually made the purchase a very strange deal
indeed.
It made these disclosures because Roddy Boyd, a former New York Post reporter
who now runs the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation, had found out about
the Philidor relationship and begun asking questions. So had several Wall Street
critics of the company, including John Hemptonof Bronte Capital.
Valeants disclosures last week along with subsequent allegations by Citron
Research that Valeant was cooking the books as well as stories by Boyd and
several others have caused the stock to tank.
On Monday, Pearson and his executive team held a lengthy conference call with
investors in which they insisted Valeant had complied with applicable law. But
Valeant also announced that a committee of the board would investigate the ties
with Philidor. And it urged the S.E.C. to investigate Citron. This was also a tactic
Biovail once used to silence its critics; it backfired spectacularly when the S.E.C.
concluded that the critics were the ones who had it right.
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RECENT COMMENTS
Hemingway
14 minutes ago
Kudos to Joe Nocera, who unlike his counterparts at the Wall Street Journal, properly
attributes the hard-nosed investigative work that...
The Poet McTeagle
14 minutes ago
So when the price of certain drugs went up by 500%, 200%, that was okay, but
when Valeant manipulated Philidor and Wall Street got nervous...
Jonathan Katz

14 minutes ago
The Bernie Madoff of the pharmaceutical industry.

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It is difficult, if not impossible, to understand all the implications of the PhilidorValeant relationship, or whether anything genuinely illegal has taken place. But the
whole thing looks pretty, well, sleazy.
As The Timess Andrew Pollack pointed out last week, Valeant uses Philidor to keep
patients from getting generics instead of its high-priced drugs. Philidor negotiates
directly with the insurance companies, saving patients from feeling the sticker
shock their price hikes would otherwise cause. The co-pay is often waived, which
only adds to the allure of using Philidor.
The evidence strongly suggests that Philidor is controlled by Valeant, even though it
is supposed to be an independent company. The Wall Street Journal reported that
certain Valeant employees work at Philidor using fake names.
But why? And why did Valeant fail to disclose the relationship for so long? If there
was really nothing wrong, why did Valeant keep it a secret? Why, even now, are
there more questions than answers?
Maybe it will all turn out to be innocent. But I remember another company that Wall
Street once swooned over, a company that had eye-popping growth, but also had
secrets, which eventually destroyed it.
You probably remember that company, too. Its name was Enron.