More than 200 small business owners in Oakland shut their doors for a couple hours Tuesday to take time to voice their concerns about rising crime in the city.
The strike came just days after the city admitted to missing a deadline to apply for millions of state dollars to fight retail theft.
"Without basic safety, there's no business," Cal State East Bay assistant professor Dr. Jennifer Tran said. "Without basic safety, there's no community."
Business owners gathered on Clay Street outside Le Cheval, the beloved family-owned Vietnamese restaurant that is closing at the end of the week, and cited brazen and frequent crime as the main reason for the closure.
"I'm asking everyone to not just think about this as one isolated business closing," Kingston 11 Cuisine owner Nigel Jones said. "Think about it from a systematic problem."
Jones' restaurant is one of several undergoing repairs after burglars broke in earlier this month.
"This time they broke through the front door and also took our cash register, about $500 in cash, and $3,500 in damages," he said.
Jones hopes the strike will spur city leaders into taking more action.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. >Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
Carl Chan, president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, brought upwards of 60 Chinatown businesses to participate in the strike.
"When people learned about we missed the deadline by the city, we don't want to waste time blaming anybody," he said. "We want to do something more positive, so today we want to also focus on the solutions, what we can do together."
