Like the 'War on Drugs' has done to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Now, a SWAT team might kick down your door at 3 AM over old (unpaid) parking tickets. (Oops, sorry about the dog, wrong address).
Damn straight. I’m not willing to give up my rights and freedoms just to attempt to make sure some guy isn’t getting high somewhere (and fail in the attempt to do so anyway). I don’t actually care that much if the guy gets high and I care a LOT about my rights.
In fact the way I look at it is like this: there was crime in Colonial times, yet the Founding Fathers didn’t think that meant the government should have unlimited powers. If a cop can’t get the job done within the rules laid down two centuries before he made the decision to join the force, too bad. He needs to go be an accountant, or a soldier, or a burger flipper. Looking at it on a societal level, same story. If you can’t combat a certain crime and still obey the Constitution, either improve your personnel or improve your methods, or resign yourself to the idea that this particular crime isn’t worth the cost to prevent it. The Constitution was the rule book for permissible crime fighting techniques by the state when you took the job. Taking it with the intention of changing the rules is cheating and morally repugnant.