Police apparently got a tip on Monday night that a separate group was planning on looting the mall. They intercepted a convoy of cars many with out of state plates gathering in the empty parking lot and which fled when they saw the police.
I guess that’s one thing that works in favor of suburban malls being only reachable via car, versus the destruction inflicted upon urban malls in my State.
Apparently there had been public social media posts calling for the looting which got passed along to local police which deployed ahead of time to close the mall and clear out the parking lots.
Op sec is particularly difficult I guess when these groups do not have pre-formed networks and are just sending out public recruitment posts to commit crimes.
Anecdote aside, I think that Signal isn’t going to support the many-to-many broadcast messaging that large groups would need to organize effectively (whether peaceably or otherwise) and a system which allowed mass coordination is that much more likely to be infiltrated (see e.g. Project Veritas’ latest work against Antifa).