Allegiance redefines what It means to be a 'Surrey Girl'

People attach a lot of labels to Sabrina Sohal. In Allegiance, a new procedural from CBC, the rookie police officer, played by Sort Of's Supinder Wraich, is top of her class at the police academy, the apple of her politician father's eye, and determined to make a difference in the community she works in. 

Sabrina is also a girl from Surrey, British Columbia. Set in the lower mainland's second most populous city, Allegiance follows Sabrina and her police detachment as they patrol the city and fight crime. Part of what makes Wraich's heroine so determined is the fact that she knows the community and the people her branch is tasked with serving — she's a local girl — which comes with some negative assumptions. Anyone familiar with the West Coast city knows that being labelled a "Surrey Girl" has historically been a loaded insult — code for a woman who is promiscuous and uneducated. In recent years, the term has also been coded for offensive stereotypes about Indo-Canadian women. 

"I didn't set out to go make a show in Surrey," says series creator Anar Ali, who was unfamiliar with the stereotype. "I started out with what I often do, which is starting from character." She wanted to explore the character of Sabrina, a  "strong, independent woman" who has experienced racism due to her skin colour but also has "privileges as a middle-class, educated woman." Looking to explore Sabrina's experience in the justice system, it makes sense that Ali would end up in Surrey, a city with one of Canada's largest Sikh populations and the country's largest RCMP detachment. "I let the characters take me where they belong," Ali says. 

Wraich, who plays the titular heroine, grew up in Rexdale, Ontario, a diverse community near Toronto with its own complicated reputation. "There's this relationship when you grow up in a community that's seen [a certain way] from the outside. It's ghettoized," Wraich says.

Sabrina pushes through hardship and keeps going 

As important as Sabrina's community and culture are to her character, this is series about a woman who confronts hardship and decides to keep going. When her politician father is publicly arrested — while she's delivering the graduation speech at her police academy —  she still shows up the next day for her first day of work. Ultimately, it's this ability to persevere, to push out on her own and keep going that truly defines — and redefines — Sabrina as a Surrey Girl. They have grit.  "She's like any other sort of Surrey girl in terms of, she's independent and she's street smart," Wraich says. "Which is one of the things that you get when you grow up in a community that has a lot of different types of people that live there."

As a rookie cop, Sabrina is not one to accept the status quo. She grills her veteran partner about why police don't work harder to prevent crimes by allocating resources "upstream." She trusts her own hard-earned insights will help guide her work and she wants to make changes in the police force. Because to be a Surrey Girl — within the context of this show — is to intimately understand the tensions between members of the community and law enforcement because they've lived and experienced it. 

When Sabrina apprehends someone stealing a car in Episode 3, she recognizes the former star athlete from her high school. The two retrace their different paths, with the suspect insisting she'd "rather be broke than blue." 

"There's lots of reasons not to be a cop," Sabrina concedes. "And a Surrey Girl should know all of them," the suspect spits back. 

Allegiance doesn't gloss over the reality of systemic racism many South Asian Canadians and minority communities still face. Sabrina faces racism on the job. Members of the community are subjected to profiling for reasons of race, class and addiction. But for Ali, the hope is that through Sabrina's empathetic approach to policing the community she grew up in, audiences may see another possibility when it comes to justice. "We're also trying to be aspirational," Ali says, "showing what policing and restorative justice could look like if we're not so binary about us versus them, bad person versus good person. But looking at it from a very compassionate, humanitarian perspective."

And for Wraich, perhaps seeing a Surrey girl like Sabrina on-screen will change policing, and the relationship between communities and the police services off-screen. "The interesting thing about where Sabrina sits is that she's seen a world a little bit from both sides, and she carries that perspective into the job," Wraich says.