Send in the Guard!

Once again, ideas that will probably never come to be:

• Over the weekend, the violence in Chicago dropped dramatically. But that's not good enough for a South Side minister who wants the National Guard to help patrol Chicago's streets.

  Marble Rock Baptist Church Minister Gregory Daniels and his supporters marched outside Chicago police headquarters on Monday. "I have seen Chicago police go to a scene and get shot at," Rev. Daniels said. "They need some policing here other than Chicago police."

  Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis disagrees. He points out that the number of people shot and killed dropped over the weekend after a bloody 24 hours spanning Thursday and Friday. And he noted that he had 36 officers at one recent shooting scene, and someone decided to start shooting again anyways.

And once again, the temperature needs to get some of the credit, if not all. The last few nights, the readings fell into the 30s with frost warnings. Crime dropped proportionally. It isn't rocket science, it's an demonstrable phenomenon. And a weekend doesn't prove a trend, though J-Fled tries to play this every single time there is a fluctuation in the rate of shootings.

But back to the National Guard idea. In the absence of actually having rioting on a scale not seen since 1968, we don't see the Guard being allowed to operate in the city. The Guard is useful for two things - moving sandbags in the event of a natural disaster and operating in a military theater killing enemy combatants. Using combat troops as a police force is fraught with all sorts of complications.