How NATJOINTS works: who decides where police deploy after Durban and Soweto protests

Thirty people have been arrested after this week’s anti-undocumented-immigration protests in the Durban CBD, Soweto and Johannesburg, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng. The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, known as NATJOINTS, says heightened police deployments will stay in place at the hotspots. As SABC News reported on 10 October, the arrests cover offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest.

For a reader trying to work out what happens next, the useful question is not what NATJOINTS said. It is what NATJOINTS is, what it can actually order, and who a person caught up in a deployment can ask about their own case.

NATJOINTS is a standing coordination structure rather than a police station or a court. It brings the South African Police Service together with metro police, the intelligence services and other departments so that a single operation is run under one plan instead of each service acting on its own. It is chaired at senior SAPS level and reports into the police ministry. It does not lay charges, it does not prosecute, and it does not decide guilt. It decides deployment: how many members, from which units, in which areas, for how long.

That is why the phrase “heightened deployments will remain in place” matters more than it sounds. It is an operational decision, and it is reversible. A deployment can be extended, reduced or lifted without any new law being passed and without any court being involved. The public signal to watch is therefore not a statement but a change in what people see on the ground: how many officers are on a street, whether roads reopen, whether a police cordon stays up overnight.

The arrest figures themselves are a count, not a finding. A person who is arrested has not been convicted. Under South African law an arrested person must be brought before a court as soon as reasonably possible, and generally within 48 hours, unless a court grants an extension. They have the right to be told the reason for the arrest, to remain silent, to legal representation and to apply for bail. Those rights sit with the person, not with the structure that deployed the officers.

For the 30 people now in the system, the practical path runs through the courts rather than through NATJOINTS. The charges listed, public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest, are decided by a prosecutor and tested before a magistrate. The Gatherings Act sets out when a gathering is unlawful and what notice organisers must give, and it also sets out the process for a person who believes an arrest was unlawful. None of that is settled by a briefing.

What a reader will notice in the coming days is more concrete than any statement. In Durban and in Gauteng, the questions are whether the deployment is scaled back, whether the arrested appear in court and on what charges, and whether the protests themselves continue. Those three things, not the wording of a briefing, tell South Africans what the state has actually decided.

The structure’s role in a week like this one is coordination, and coordination is genuinely useful when several services and several provinces are involved. It is also the reason a single briefing can sound larger than it is. Deployments end quietly. Court rolls do not.