Otto is a behavioral scientist and chair, public order management, at the Police Academy of the Netherlands and in that capacity has done extended research on police use of force issues, including the introduction of less-lethal weapons such as pepper spray and electro conducted devices and the policing of assemblies.
He was an expert adviser on the ‘Human Rights Handbook on Policing Assemblies’ for the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe), as well as for the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions on the proper management of assemblies. He was senior adviser to the EU-funded GODIAC-project (good practices in dialogue and communication) coordinated by the Swedish police, which brought together 25 police institutions from 14 different European countries to identify good practice in the policing of political protest. He has been on international missions with Amnesty International researching conflictive situations in Bahrain, Kenya and South Africa.
Otto is also professor by special appointment in Security and Collective Behavior at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and a visiting professor at the Canterbury Centre of Policing Research (UK).
Access some of Otto’s recent publications on the new internal police procedure for reporting on and learning from use of force in the Netherlands (with a powerpoint in English) as well as an evaluation of the Dutch Taser pilot: