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WAIT. We seem to have a lot of opinions on the board and even some quotes from Wikipedia, but very few factual answers.

The one poster who quoted the law is correct that your description of the events does not match the elements of the offense. The law requires the language to be profane or abusive, used in a public place, and it must tend to incite a breach of the peace. No where is the word offensive mentioned in this section of the law.

So, by your description, the language used was abusive and possibly profane, and the parking lot was a public place. There is no indication that there was any tendency to incite the breach of the peace, so there was no law broken.

Note that this is based on your description and the officer's report may have other information in it. The security guard and the officer may have gotten together after the incident (they do work together) and clarified the report language. It is important to note that the language does NOT have to cause a breach of the peace, just tend to. If the language made the security officer mad enough to want to hit you but he restrained himself out of professionalism, then the tendency was there and the ticket is good. But this tendency has to be shown in the report.

Someone posted that an officer could not be the offended party. I can personally guarantee that this is not mentioned anywhere in the law and is not true. I have written many tickets for other types of violations that do require someone being offended where I was the offended party. This may be a common belief, but the courts have ruled many times that an officer is still a citizen and does not give up his rights because of the job.

Others posted that the officer could not write the ticket because the victim (offended party) needs to file the complaint with the court. Again, this is not written in the law anywhere and cops write tickets all of the time for offenses they did not see. As proof of this, think how many tickets get written for shoplifters that got caught by security guards and detained untilt he officer gets there, or how many tickets get written at traffic accidents where the officer did not see the accident. And before you object that there is evidence there, an eyewitness testimony is evidence enough if the officer believes the witness. A ticket may or may not be the complaint filed with the court. Some cities use the ticket itself as the complaint, others use it simply as another form of report and generate a formal complaint for the court. But a complaint only requires probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It is certainly legal to write a ticket for an offense that you did not see.

Part of the confusion on this issue is the officer's authority for an arrest. To make the arrest for the misdemeanor, an officer must have it occur in his presence or view or fit into a few minor exceptions to that rule. But to write a ticket is not an arrest. To make a traffic stop is an arrest under the Kurtz decision, but it said nothing about non-traffic arrests or citations. Just as an officer can file charges on someone for an offense they cannot arrest for, they can write a ticket the same way.


EDIT: I forgot to reiterate, the ticket is probably not a valid charge due to not including the elements of the offense. Make sure your lawyer knows that when he meets with the DA. If he does not or the DA won't drop the charge do not plead it out, even with deferred adjudication. Work a plea bargain where you plead guilty to some other class C misdemeanor that is not part of 42.01 (maybe a class C assault threat or something similar). Then you won't have to worry about your CHL. It sounds stupid to be able to plead guilty to an assault but not to cursing in public, but that is the law.