Actor Shia LaBeouf was arrested in Savannah, Georgia, early Saturday morning for public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and obstruction, Variety reports. LaBeouf is in town filming The Peanut Butter Falcon, an independent film in which he plays an outlaw who helps a young man with Down syndrome pursue his dream of attending a wrestling school.
According to Variety, things went downhill in the early hours of the morning, when LaBeouf asked a police officer (!) for a cigarette. When neither the officer nor a bystander could help him, the actor—in the inimitable language of scandalized police reports from the Deep South—“use[d] profanities and vulgar language in front of the women and children present.” (Those women and children were apparently hanging out at City Market at 4 in the morning, an hour at which one should arguably expect a certain level of commotion from intoxicated Shia LaBeoufs, but the law is the law.) When the officer attempted to arrest LaBeouf, he fled to a nearby hotel, where police apprehended him in the lobby. He was released on $3,500 bond late Saturday morning.
As difficult as it is to be arrested for public intoxication in Savannah, Georgia, LaBeouf was not the only person in the area to have a terrible Friday night. The Chatham County Sheriff’s Office reports that, including LaBeouf, 58 people were booked into the Chatham County Jail in the 24-hour period in which he was arrested. Thirty-six were black, accounting for 62 percent of bookings in this 40 percent black county. In addition to the usual weekend parade of driving under-the-influences and public drunkenness, the county’s various police departments booked five black men on marijuana-related charges, including a 51-year-old whose crimes include not only possessing less than one ounce of marijuana but also failing to use a turn signal, which is presumably how the marijuana thing came up. The majesty of the law set that hardened lane-changing criminal’s bond at $3,700, $200 more than that faced by the star of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Transformers. One white man (not LaBeouf) was booked for “possession of drug-related objects”; none were booked for marijuana possession. (Anecdotes are not data, so here is some data.)
LaBeouf is no stranger to the outlaw-celebrity lifestyle: He faced a similar arrest for public drunkenness in Austin in 2015, and was arrested again in January after a fracas at his anti-Trump art installation “He Will Not Divide Us.” He will return to theaters in Borg vs. McEnroe this fall.
