Gmail does not allow changing email addresses, and if I delete the account, I lose access to a recovery email that I'm executing a multi-year migration away from. That's simply not an acceptable step to take to mitigate the unlikely risk you describe.
There's also some jerk at AOL who forwarded their email to me mistakenly over a decade ago, and I've tried to contact AOL, which of course they won't consider since I'm not the person who set the broken forward.
While I appreciate your concern, I've already taken it into consideration as best as permitted by the tools available. If you are aware of a way to change a gmail address without creating a new Google Account, then of course I would love to hear about it.
Over 50% of the email this account receives is for other people and frequently the "To:" field isn't even an exact match for my address!
If you do start getting stuff that looks like it might cause you problems: be proactive. Do not wait around to embarrass some prosecutor. By that time, you've already spent thousands of dollars and had your reputation dragged through the mud. I once started getting legal threats meant for someone else. I had a lawyer call up that lawyer and it was cleared up in less than 10 minutes. Another time I started getting emails from/to a person with the same name as me at the State Department that definitely should not have been sent through a non-government server. I talked to someone I knew at the US Attorneys Office about it and those emails stopped immediately (doubt that guy still works there, LOL).
Not going to be so great when they engage in criminal activity that points back to you. I do a password reset on their account whenever I find someone using my email. Then you can change the email to a throwaway or delete the account. It's unsafe to let it be.