How do you lose the police in GTA 6?

Nobody outside Rockstar has played a GTA 6 chase, so nobody can tell you how to end one. What the Extended Look does show is a wanted display with more on it than stars: under them sit icons that read as what the police know about you. If that reading holds, it changes what “losing them” means, and it is the one thing this page can say with a frame behind it.

What the material 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. At 15:49 the car icon is still there, with a dark saloon on the road in front of the camera, and at 15:57 it is gone while four stars are still lit: a saloon of the same shape stands in a covered car park with its door open. At 16:16 the block still shows three icons. We hold no frame between 15:49 and 15:57, and none that shows that car on fire, so what took the car icon away the frames do not say. What they do show is one icon going while the other three and the level stay.

The face and the hanger point the same way. At 15:57 a woman is mid-stride beside that car with a red bandana pulled up over her nose and mouth, and the icons in the top right corner 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 whose icons read as 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 map wash, no message. The nearest thing is a change in the stars themselves. At 18:05 the two stars on the right carry the white outline of a lit star but are dark inside, where at 18:25 the same two are white. A meter that flashes while the police have lost sight of you, as Grand Theft Auto V’s did, would draw both, but two stills cannot show a flash. The end of a chase is exactly the part the frames we have leave out.

What nobody knows

• How long a search lasts, and whether it is line of sight, a radius, or the icons themselves.
• What clears each icon: changing clothes for the hanger, a mask for the face, ditching the car for the car. The frames show the car icon going on its own, not why.
• 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 body shop 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 the police had not spotted you on the way in, 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 seems to itemise 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.