30 arrests, two provinces, one structure: how NATJOINTS turns a protest into a police operation

Thirty people have been arrested after this week’s anti-undocumented-immigration protests in Durban, Soweto and Johannesburg, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, for offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, known as NATJOINTS, says heightened police deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, that is the state’s account of the policing operation. What follows is how the machine behind that account works, because the structure that decides where the vans go is not the same thing as the officers standing on the corner, and the difference matters to anyone who ends up in a cell.

NATJOINTS is not a police station and it is not a unit. It is a standing coordination structure that brings the South African Police Service together with the metro police departments, the defence force where it is called on, the State Security Agency and the intelligence arms of the security cluster, so that one operation is run off one plan instead of several. When a protest spreads across two provinces in the same week, that is the problem it exists to solve: who moves, who pays, who reports to whom, and who speaks for all of it. The briefings the public sees are the visible end of that coordination, not the structure itself.

That is also why the deployment can stay up after the crowds have gone home. A heightened deployment is a standing instruction, not an incident. It is decided at cluster level, funded from provincial policing budgets, and kept in place while the structure assesses the area as a hotspot. A reader in Durban or Soweto will notice it as more marked vehicles, more roadblocks and more stops, and it will not lift on the day the last placard comes down.

The arrests are the other half of the mechanism, and they are where most people misunderstand what has happened. Public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest are separate offences with separate elements, and they are not interchangeable. A person can be arrested for obstruction without any allegation of violence, and a gathering can be unlawful without anyone being accused of damage. The numbers released by NATJOINTS record the counts people were arrested under, not findings. Nobody has been convicted of anything by a briefing.

What happens next is a criminal process, and it is slow. An arrested person must be brought before a court, ordinarily within 48 hours, where bail is considered. From there the matter is either withdrawn, diverted or enrolled, and the enrolled cases are prosecuted by the National Prosecuting Authority, which is independent of the police and decides on its own whether there is a case to answer. NATJOINTS can order a deployment. It cannot order a conviction.

The practical question for anyone caught up in it is the same one that applies at any operation of this kind: which officer made the arrest, on what charge, and on whose instruction the operation was mounted. Those are the things a court will ask about, and they are the reason the record of an operation matters as much as the operation itself.

What the structure does not do is decide policy. It coordinates enforcement of the law as it stands, and the law on undocumented immigration is made in Parliament and administered by the Department of Home Affairs, not by the police cluster. That distinction is worth holding on to in a week when a policing briefing can start to look like a position on immigration. It is not. It is a position on public order, and the two arguments are being run as one.