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Escaping 100 Cops: The Hiding Plans That Worked and the Ones That Didn't

MrBeast ミスタービースト · ▶ 20:23 · 9 min read
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Overview

The video sets up one question: can five people stay free for a full day while 100 police officers hunt them through a mock city? Jimmy (MrBeast) and four friends, Darius, Tareq, Nolan, and Alison, try to outlast the police until the deadline. Jimmy says he spent months preparing the city in their favor. The result shows how far that preparation got them and where it failed.

9 min read

The Rules and the Stakes

The opening sets the terms. The police have until the end of the day to arrest the group. If they catch everyone, they win half a million dollars. If the group escapes, the police get nothing. In a later briefing, a police leader tells the officers that each arrest earns their department $100,000. On the other side, any team member who survives what is described as a 12-hour chase wins $100,000 for their mom.

Jimmy says he spent months preparing to give the group "a fighting chance." He set up hundreds of cameras, booby traps, and secret rooms around the city, and adds that he hopes it will be enough.

0:09

A Fast Start and an Early Arrest

The chase starts with the group fleeing in a vehicle while the police stay close behind. Jimmy promises he has a plan, and the group sets off an explosion that he says "should buy us some time." Then they split up. Each person goes to a planned spot. Darius hides inside a fort covered in hay. Others quickly change clothes, and Alison hides among the trash.

The hay fort doesn't last. Officers notice that a stack of straw bales "looks a little suspicious," surround it, and order Darius out. About ten minutes into the challenge, Darius becomes the first arrest. When Darius tries to apologize to the team over the radio, the others joke that the apology should go to Darius's mom, who is watching.

1:56

Reading the Police Line and Going Underneath It

While the others hide, Jimmy and Tareq watch how the police search. The officers form a straight line, sweep the city, and check "every nook and cranny." Jimmy sees a weakness in this. If the group can get past the line, the police probably won't look for them in buildings they have already searched.

The group gets past the line through tunnels under the city. Jimmy believes the police don't know the tunnels exist. Moving through the sewer system, they hear officers walking above them. When they come back up, Jimmy reasons that the police line passed over them while they were underground. That would put them behind the line, free to cross an open field. He admits that if everyone gets caught, "this video's screwed." The field turns out to be empty of police.

About three hours in, the group splits up again. One member takes the subway, and Jimmy brings Nolan with him to get as far from the line as possible.

3:40

Hideouts Start to Fall

The middle of the day goes badly for the hiding spots. Officers close in on one team member, who reaches a secret compartment in the back corner of a room by pulling on a wall. Police arrive anyway, and the person found there calls it the most embarrassing moment of their life.

Jimmy heads to a school where he had planned a hidden room that, he says, the police would "NEVER" find. When he gets there, the police have already found it. They missed two things, though: a detonator Jimmy had left there, and a remote that lets a TV cycle through every camera in the city. Jimmy puts the detonator in his bag with his $100,000 and says it will "come in handy later." At the halfway point, he sums up the situation: most of their hideouts have been exposed and Darius is in custody. From here on, he says, the plan is a backup master plan.

5:39

Diversions: Explosions and Doppelgangers

The backup plan starts with Nolan walking up to the police and greeting them, then running. Jimmy follows this with a second diversion that he openly says is mostly for spectacle. He "really just wanted to have a lot of explosions," and it "might not make much sense," but it looks epic. Afterward, officers say they can't see anything and won't catch the person they were chasing. Nolan calls it the coolest thing they've ever done.

Jimmy calls his next idea "a little bit more useful." He has hired more than fifty doppelgangers of himself and placed them around the city. He sends one of them to lead the rest to the movie theater. The instruction is that once police go in to search, the doors get locked behind them. The trap works. Officers see a crowd of people in black with backpacks running into the theater, call for backup, and follow them inside, without knowing the building has "one way in and no way out." Jimmy expects the officers to be stuck for hours and plays them a recording of himself counting to 100,000.

8:26

A Locked Shed, Tareq's Arrest, and a Gear Cache

Nolan reaches what is supposed to be a safe house and gets locked inside a shed. Jimmy explains that Nolan has to win a 2v2 match in Call of Duty: Mobile, the video's sponsor, to unlock equipment that will make the rest of the challenge much easier. The match result unlocks a door code, which turns out to be 000. Nolan says they probably could have guessed that.

At the same time, Tareq hides in a Feastables café. Officers spot someone in a doorway, enter from the front while covering the back, and find a locked trap door. They stand on the trap door so Tareq can't get out, then arrest Tareq and take Tareq's $100,000. Jimmy uses the commotion as a diversion and runs while the officers celebrate. At the jail, Tareq finds Darius and a cell already labeled with Tareq's name.

Inside the cache, Nolan finds night vision goggles, a ghillie suit, smoke grenades, and a UAV that shows where everyone is. It confirms that Tareq and Darius are in jail. Nolan calls the gear overpowered.

10:39

Night Falls

After dark, the police radio calls the city "a ghost town." Their stated plan is to wait for the group to slip up, while officers prepare to search everything again in case they missed something.

The UAV becomes the group's main tool. Nolan watches it and guides Jimmy and Alison toward the movie theater as a meeting point. At one point Nolan warns Jimmy that two officers are directly ahead. Jimmy, who thought he was in the clear, lies down beside some parked cars, turns off his lights and even his camera, and hides in a shadow until the officers pass. Afterward Jimmy credits Nolan: "I was COOKED." Jimmy also shows the viewer what the darkness looks like without night vision, to explain why the police are struggling. The cameras pick up everything, but it's hard to see with the naked eye.

The video then cuts to Nolan holding up a donut. Next, officers are told to track what the suspects are wearing, and the radio reports that one suspect is possibly in a ghillie suit.

13:22

The Jailbreak Gamble

Jimmy decides to try breaking Darius and Tareq out of jail. He calls it possibly "the dumbest thing I've ever done," but says he couldn't let them go home with nothing for their moms. A building in the city has an underground tunnel that leads straight to the jail, which is also the police headquarters. If they're spotted, the tunnel is the only way out. To clear a path, Jimmy sends a doppelganger to headquarters to distract the officers, which draws some of them out to investigate.

Jimmy, Nolan, and Alison walk through long tunnels, which the video shows partly in uncut footage and time-lapses, until they reach the prison. They can see the cells down the hall and hear Darius. Jimmy notes that only two hours remain in the challenge. The hallway looks empty, but as they move in, an officer spots them and they run back into the tunnel. Darius shouts after them for help.

Jimmy tells Nolan to drop a smoke grenade. Over the radio, police call it unsafe to continue the pursuit and report the suspects still on the run in the tunnels. Alison stops during the escape, and Jimmy and Nolan think Alison has been caught, calling it a sacrifice. Meanwhile the police remind each other there is "only ONE WAY out of that tunnel" and send units to its exit. Then Alison radios in: Alison has found a hole and was not caught. The three agree to meet at a set of shipping containers.

16:39

The Final Sweep

The police switch to night vision, form a skirmish line, and converge on the area they consider the last likely location. One team member tries the woods, and officers checking the tree line spot eyes in the trees and make an arrest. Jimmy's narration looks back on the day: eleven hours earlier they had set out "to pull off the impossible." Even in a city "ENTIRELY designed to outsmart and outrun one hundred cops," he says, it has proven to be "a true test," and all that remains is to outlast.

They don't manage it. Officers decide the remaining suspects must be in a container. The group runs into a dead end, the police set up a perimeter on the north side of the road, and officers move in with "State Police. Stay down!" The last members are handcuffed, Jimmy among them, saying, "We were so close."

With about an hour and a half left, the police had caught all five, winning the half-million dollars. Despite months of preparation, hidden rooms, tunnels, decoys, and the gear cache, the 100 officers outlasted the group in the end.

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