How NATJOINTS works: who runs the police response when protests break out in Durban and Soweto

When protest breaks out in a South African city and the response is described as a national deployment, the body being described is usually the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, known as NATJOINTS. It is not a police station, a unit or a single commander. It is a standing coordinating structure that brings the South African Police Service together with other state departments and agencies so that a response to unrest is planned once, in one room, rather than separately by each service.

That is the mechanism South Africans are being told about this week. As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS said heightened police deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg, where protest followed anti-undocumented immigration demonstrations. The same report put the arrest figure at 30, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and 5 in Gauteng, for offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest.

The point of the structure is coordination. A protest that closes a road, a taxi route or a market street is not only a policing matter. It touches metro traffic, disaster management, emergency medical services, and in some cases the provincial and national departments responsible for the affected area. NATJOINTS exists so that those services are given one operational picture and one set of priorities, rather than each reacting on its own.

What that means for a reader is narrower and more practical. The deployment is decided at coordination level and carried out by members on the ground. The arrests are made by the members who are present. The charges that follow are decided by the police and then by the National Prosecuting Authority, which is a separate institution and does not take instructions from the police on whether to prosecute. A person arrested in Durban or Soweto this week is therefore in the hands of three different parts of the state in sequence, not one.

The offences named in the report are the ordinary public order counts that attach to a crowd that has been dispersed and to individuals who are alleged to have resisted. Public violence and illegal gathering are the charges that follow the gathering itself. Obstruction and resisting arrest are the charges that follow the encounter between a person and a member. Each has to be proved against a named person in a court, and an arrest is not a finding.

This is where the South African reader has context that a short broadcast summary does not carry. NATJOINTS statements are operational. They say what is being deployed and what has been recorded. They do not, and are not designed to, explain why people were on the street, what they were demanding, or what the state intends to do about the underlying issue. Those questions sit with the departments that received the demands, not with the coordinating structure.

That gap matters because the events of this week did not begin with a deployment. They began with residents and demonstrators taking a position on undocumented immigration and on enforcement, a debate that has been running in South African public life for years and that has produced marches, memoranda and demands directed at Home Affairs, the police and local government. A reader who only sees the deployment and the arrest count learns what the state did. A reader who wants to understand the week needs the demand as well.

There is also a practical question the structure raises and does not answer on its own. Heightened deployment at hotspots is a temporary measure. It is renewed, reduced or withdrawn according to an operational assessment. Nothing in the report sets out how long the deployments will last, what would have to change for them to be scaled down, or what the police intend to do about the conditions that produced the protest in the first place. Those are fair questions to put to the SAPS national office and to the provincial commissioners in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.

SABC News reported the NATJOINTS briefing and the arrest figures. The Enquirer has not independently verified the arrest count, which is the police’s own figure and is reported here as such.

For anyone directly affected, the sequence is what matters. An arrested person is entitled to be brought before a court within 48 hours, to legal representation, and to know the charge. Family members looking for a detained person should approach the police station in the district where the arrest was made, and can also approach the Independent Police Investigative Directorate if there is a complaint about how the arrest was carried out. IPID is a separate body from the SAPS and investigates the police, not the public.

The deployments remain in place. The charges will follow their own course through the courts. The demands that put people on the street are still sitting with the departments that have to answer them.