KING CASE AFTERMATH: A CITY IN CRISIS : COMMENTARY : These Juries Are a World Apart

All the talk here has been about juries and protests, and a lot of people have been leaving town, but this isn’t L.A. These people have taken their bowsprits and gone home.

In L.A., it’s lights out at Dodger Stadium, and the ponies are penned up, but it has been business as usual here at the America’s Cup.

Reporters have come from around the world to cover the Cup. Most watch the races on three television feeds offered on monitors spotted around the media center, because you can see a lot more on TV than from the media boat.

The last few days, some of the monitors have been switched to Channel 5 from L.A., presenting a contrast in spectacles--on the left burning and looting in Los Angeles, on the right sun-tanned sailors breezing along under clear blue skies. On the left, fire, smoke, destruction and anarchy. On the right, fresh air and clean, wholesome, disciplined sport. Two worlds at once.

The foreign journalists must wonder, with understandable detachment, do we do this all the time, or just every three or four years, like the America’s Cup?

Some of us are less detached. I live in the City of Los Angeles, in the harbor area, with rival Latino gangs on both sides. I hear gunshots at night, and I know all about drive-by shootings.

But I can’t quite comprehend what I’m seeing in unfamiliar TV shots from familiar places: the Civic Center, where I work; the Harbor Freeway, which I drive.

Late Wednesday night I was finishing a story about the day’s sailboat races with an eye and ear cocked to the TV. When I heard “L.A. Times” I perked up to full attention.

Immediately I messaged the office on my computer. I was told that rioters were breaking up the first floor. Sports is on the third. The Times has security guards at every entrance, night and day, but I didn’t think asking an intruder for an employee ID would stop anybody.

Reporters and photographers I’ve worked with are being assaulted, threatened and shot at. While I’m here writing about a sailboat race, thugs are threatening my colleagues 130 miles away. The most serious thing I have to worry about is getting seasick. It gives another meaning to remote computer terminal.

The challengers’ race jurors here have been the subject of some abuse for decisions relating to New Zealand’s bowsprit and other esoteric concerns, but they don’t have anything in common with the Rodney King jury.

It’s not that the sailing crowd is oblivious to L.A. A few of the sailors have asked what I hear from home. But what can they do? What can anybody do? Might as well just keep on sailing.

You won’t believe this, but some of the emotions here have been pretty intense, too--I mean, multimillionaires accusing one another of bad manners and poor sportsmanship.

By the time I come home next month, I imagine things will be back to normal, whatever that is in L.A. anymore. I don’t know which world I’m seeing is real. Maybe, at home, I’ll be able to figure out how it all relates.

From here, I don’t have a clue.