When someone is arrested, it is Jackie Cooper’s job to make sure they are safe.

For 25 years, she has been checking detainees are treated properly and given food, water, and a blanket.

Now, she has won an award for her services.

Later this month the 65-year-old from Haywards Heath will collect a prestigious British Citizen Award from the Palace of Westminster in recognition

of her work as an

Independent Custody Visitor (ICV).

ICVs are volunteers who visit police custody suites unannounced.

Jackie checks on the welfare of detainees and makes sure they are treated with dignity and respect in accordance with the Human Rights Act and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

There are about a dozen ICVs in her team.

When she trains new volunteers, she starts by showing them around the custody centre.

She said: “We always begin with a tour of the place from the point of view of someone taken into custody so volunteers know what detainees can expect.

“It’s probably a bit scary when you go into custody if you’ve never been in

before.

“Detainees are brought in by police car or van and taken into an unloading bay.

“Then you’re taken to a cell. It can be pretty bleak really.

“In the Brighton Custody Centre in Hollingbury, the walls are magnolia. There’s a fixed bench with a mattress and a pillow.

“There’s a heavy metal sliding door and a key pad – there are no keys jangling.”

Jackie explained the way people imagine police custody is often popular misconception.

“Fingerprinting is now digital and the days of flash photos against height

marks on the wall are long gone.

She said: “It’s more like a photobooth now and there’s no rolling your finger in black ink.

“There’s water, tea, coffee, hot chocolate and microwave meals at regular intervals throughout the day.

“It’s worth saying the detainees are all innocent – everybody is innocent until they are proven guilty.

“And we don’t know why these people have been detained or who they are,

so we can be completely impartial.

“Detainees are often feeling worried, apprehensive, and emotional.

“Some have been there and done it all before.

“Our job isn’t so much to console them. If someone is crying we’ll give them some extra time and a chance to offload.

“We don’t go up and say ‘there there’.

“But I think seeing us can allay some of their fears, especially for people in custody for the first time.

“Some don’t know they can ask for a drink of water or a blanket – and we let them know it’s OK.”

Jackie said the ICV role came about after civil unrest in 1981 when there were nationwide complaints about the way detainees were treated in custody.

She said: “There was a lot of suspicion they weren’t being treated correctly and that’s when lay visitors, the precursors to ICVs, were first appointed to go and check on them.

“Now, when we ask detainees about their experience in custody, there are very few complaints.”