One April morning in 1973 a veteran police officer named Thomas Shea pulled his service revolver and blew away a young black boy on a street in Jamaica, Queens. He shot the kid in the back. There was no chance of survival. Afterward, no one could figure out why the officer had done it. There was no reason for the shooting, no threat to Officer Shea of any kind. The boy's name was Clifford Glover and he was 10 years old.

Officer Shea was charged with murder but of course he was acquitted.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1976 an officer named Robert Torsney fired a bullet into the head of Randolph Evans, 15, outside a housing project in Brooklyn. No one could figure that one out, either. Officer Torsney would later claim he had been afflicted with a rare form of epilepsy that, remarkably, had never been noticed before the killing and was never seen after it.

The ''epilepsy'' defense worked. Officer Torsney was acquitted of any criminal wrongdoing.

The bridge between those outlandish cases of the 1970's and Monday's demoralizing acquittal of Police Officer Francis X. Livoti in the killing of Anthony Baez is littered with the bodies of New Yorkers of all ages whose lives were summarily and unjustly taken by New York City cops who managed in virtually every instance to beat the rap.

Eleanor Bumpurs is on that bridge, and Anibal Carasquillo. Ms. Bumpurs was the overweight, arthritic, emotionally disturbed 66-year-old woman who was shotgunned to death by police who broke into her apartment in a case that had to do with unpaid rent. Ms. Bumpurs, confused and counseled by her family never to let strangers into the apartment, picked up a carving knife when the cops burst in. That was the end of her.