This will give you pause. Pull up the Washington State Sex Offender Information Center Web site and search for sex offenders ringing the downtown core of Spokane. You’ll find more than 100 living within a 3-mile radius.

Up they pop on the screen, the child molesters, the rapists, the voyeurs and the kidnappers. You can see their photos, names, ages, heights and weights. Most of them look nondescript rather than frightening, a blur of blank expressions, forgettable hair, the occasional pair of glasses.

We’re surrounded by these ordinary-appearing, yet potentially risky, people. And for years, we’ve been receiving far more than our fair share from the state prison system. Of the 227 sex offenders now under supervision in Spokane County, according to a recent Spokesman-Review story, about 40 percent were convicted outside of the county.

From 1998 to 2007, the county became home to 502 sex offenders. That amounted to about 47 percent more than we sent to prison in the first place.

In the last five years, that rate dropped to 8 percent. The Department of Corrections has worked hard to limit the number of offenders it allows to live in Spokane. But that’s still 8 percent more than we should be housing.

Counties such as Spokane, King and Pierce have traditionally attracted more sex offenders than smaller rural counties that lack low-income housing, jobs and treatment programs.

But the burden placed on counties with large urban areas has been unreasonable. And now, as Spokane struggles with a low-income housing crisis, it’s the displaced sex offenders that worry us most. When their housing disappears, the likelihood of reoffense climbs.

Fortunately, the Washington Legislature enacted a new law last session which requires most offenders to return to the communities where they committed their first felony.

That law, combined with the Department of Corrections efforts to avoid unduly burdening the state’s largest counties, should help further reduce the rate of sex offender placement in Spokane.

Our county will continue to need to house, employ and treat those people whose all-too-ordinary faces pop up on the sex offender information center site. But we should be responsible for just as many as we send to prison in the first place.

It’s only fair.