How do you lose the police in GTA 6?

Nobody has played a GTA 6 chase, so nobody can tell you how to end one. What the Extended Look does show is something no earlier game in the series drew on screen: under the wanted stars sit icons for what the police actually know about you. That changes what “losing them” means, and it is the one thing this page can say with a frame behind it.

What the footage shows

At 14:13 in the Extended Look the top right corner carries a scale of six star positions with four lit, and beneath it four small red icons: two figures side by side, a clothes hanger, a single face and a car. Ninety seconds later, at 16:16, the same block shows three icons. The car is gone. In the footage between those two moments the getaway car is set alight; we hold no still of the burning, so the link is a reading of the video and not of a frame, but it is the reading the two frames support. Each icon is a piece of description the police are holding, and getting rid of the thing removes it.

The face and the hanger point the same way. At 15:57 a woman walks away from the getaway car with a red bandana pulled up over her nose and mouth, and the icons above her are the two figures, the hanger and the face. The frame does not show the mask removing anything; it shows a face covering worn deliberately, under a display that tracks faces and clothes. What chases you is also in the material: an officer on foot with POLICE across his back, marked pickups at a roadblock and in the chase, and a helicopter overhead.

No frame we hold shows more than four of the six positions lit, and none shows the search ending: no stars going grey, no map wash, no message. The end of a chase is exactly the part the footage leaves out.

What nobody knows

• How long a search lasts, and whether it is line of sight, a radius, or the icons themselves.
• Whether each icon can be cleared on its own: changing clothes for the hanger, a mask for the face, ditching the car for the car.
• What the two figures stand for. Accomplices seen together is the plain reading; the frame does not confirm it.
• Whether five or six stars exist in play, and what brings them.
• Whether hiding, a respray or the water still work, as they did in the last game.

How Grand Theft Auto V did it

This is the reference, not a prediction. Grand Theft Auto V ran to five stars, and its search was built on line of sight rather than a radius: once the police lost sight of you, cones appeared on the radar showing where they were looking, and you had to stay outside them for a length of time that depended on how high the level was. Putting on or taking off a mask or sunglasses during that search phase took one star off, which is the ancestor of the face icon above. You could hide in bushes and behind trees. The GTA Wiki also records two escapes that were not about hiding at all: driving into Los Santos Customs lost any wanted level, as long as nobody had seen you approach, and swimming deeper into the water shook the police off.

Every one of those is a thing to test on launch day against a display that now itemises what the police know. A respray, in particular, is the obvious answer to a car icon, and a change of clothes to a hanger.

What this page becomes on launch day

From 19 November 2026 this guide is rewritten from the release build: what each icon means, what clears it, how long a search runs at each level and what the stars do above four, each with the date it was tested. Until then the short answer at the top stands.