As many of you know I’ve been trying to get the message across for years now that this just doesn’t work (see above for the basic reason why). Yet another losing battle that, with your help, I continue to fight.

• A 35-year-old British man I’ll call “Chad” (because that’s his name) was jailed in October after pleading guilty to aggravated burglary. Like so many others before him, Chad tried to flee from police by running into a nearby lake. He then swam to a small island in said lake, a situation that as I’ve noted before is only marginally better than being in the lake itself. You are still surrounded by water, making it easy for police to keep an eye on you (especially now that they have drones) and to summon a boat to come arrest you at their leisure.

• We should at least give Chad credit for not trying this in, let’s say, Texas. See “Bad Places to Hide: Island in Alligator-Infested Lake” (Mar. 30, 2016).

• Or Florida, which is home to many horrible creatures even outside Mar-a-Lago, providing that additional reason not to jump into a body of water as this woman did. She allegedly stole a Honda Civic during a test drive, and after unsurprisingly failing to elude police while driving a Honda Civic, she even less surprisingly failed to elude them after wrecking the Civic and then leaping into the water, which reduced her speed even more.

• Or Australia, where a 33-year-old man also tried an “aquatic escape” after stabbing another man and being shot by a third party. That sounds serious, or at least it would if it hadn’t happened in Wagga Wagga. That city, which straddles the Murrumbidgee River and lies amidst such townships as Gregadoo, Kapooka, Yarragundry, and Gobbagombalin, sounds like a place where no event could be unamusing, and that’s true here. Please take notice, however, that the Murrumbidgee seems to be home to venomous snakes and aggressive crocodiles, and because it’s in Australia, is probably also infested with poisonous spiders the size of small horses. That would make it a bad place to jump into, especially after being shot, even if you then find an island and climb a tree. He was, of course, arrested.

• Much safer to try this in Canada, where another burglar tried to avoid police by trying to cross the Moira River in Ontario. That river is wide though not particularly deep, but still slowed him more than enough for a reception to be arranged on the other side. Again, though, this location is at least a better choice than those above because the only thing it’s infested with is Canadians.

• Finally, while there is a narrow exception to the general no-water-escapes rule for people who have boats (see “Speedboat Escape Is Exception that Proves the Rule” (Aug. 3, 2018)), that exception does not include large burning oil tankers. In July, Malaysia’s coast guard said it had located and detained one of two ships that had collided near Singapore and burst into flame. That is, it had located the one that tried to flee the scene of the accident, if the word “flee” really applies to a large oil tanker of the kind with a top speed of maybe 16 knots when it isn’t on fire. Authorities said they weren’t sure why the tanker’s crew had tried to “flee,” but its relatively low speed, the large column of black smoke it was trailing, and the 7-mile-long oil slick it was at the end of, meant they had little trouble making the arrest.

More to come, I have no doubt.