A story of extreme intoxication

Something really funny happened last night. Well, not really funny, but... funny. I live near the beach, so there's a certain amount of noise and public drunkenness that you get used to. These guys that live across the street from me were being both loud and drunk. As my girlfriend and I were walking from my car to my place at about 10:00 PM, I see them come stumbling out their front door into their yard, being pretty much just belligerently drunk. For the next 20 minutes or so, they were loud and annoying, and it crossed my mind a few times to call the cops, but when you live at the beach, like I said, this comes with the territory. You learn to deal with it. Well anyway, it became obvious within another few minutes that they had in some way locked themselves out of their own place. They proceeded to bang on their door and yell at no one in particular to let them in. At least 10-20 minutes of this incessant banging and cursing ensued, which I'm sure everyone within a one block radius heard. Then, the sound of glass breaking. I was only assuming that they had gone around back and broken a window. Laughing, wood breaking... I'm not exactly sure what they had done, but obviously they had not yet broken a large enough hole in the window/house to get in.

Next thing I hear is:

"Get on the ground. Put your hands on your head!!!!"

Well this was enough for me. I immediately went outside to get a front row view of the action. Their was a police cruiser in the alley, and it seemed that these fools might be about to get arrested for trying (in their own drunk way) to break into their own place. And someone else apparently called the cops, whether to report drunk idiots or a break in, I'm not sure, but I'm assuming the latter.

"Officer, we live here!"
"I don't care, get down on the ground, and we'll sort that out later!"
"Officer, we're drunk and we're locked out. And we're trying to break into our own house!"

Another cruiser pulls up. Lights flashing. Another cruiser. Two more. And another. So 7 police cars in total. For 3 drunk fools. At this point my girlfriend and I are laughing/starting to feel bad that these guys will get arrested.

The part I'm not clear on is this. They weren't in the front of the house. (I was assuming they were in the back.) Their back yard is fenced in. So I had assumed they had gotten in/around/over the fence. But it turns out that the wood breaking that I heard was them tearing about a 3 foot section out of the fence that encloses their back yard. If they had already broken a window, I'm not exactly sure how tearing down a fence helps, but who knows. Eventually, after about 20 minutes of this, and all 3 guys finally in hand cuffs, we wait for an officer to walk over to the police car closest to us. He walks over, and we say "Officers, they actually do live there..."

"They do? Can you identify them. They have no ID on them and no way to prove that they really live there."

"Yes, we're not friends with them but we can identify them by face."

So we did our duty and saved our neighbors from getting arrested, although after all this I am seriously wondering if we should have let them. But the best part of the whole night was when the officer walks by us as we're walking back to our front door and says:

"When we searched them, one of them had the keys in his pocket."