Madison police chief Noble Wray wants to send more officers after gang members, and he plans to talk to the mayor next week about an initiative to make that possible.

A recent assessment by the police department’s two-officer Gang Unit indicated more than 900 confirmed Madison gang members and another 500 people considered associates of gang members.

“It is clear the number of young people connected to gangs is on the rise, and we need to respond to that growth,” Wray said in a press release issued Friday.

Many gang members and their associates commit burglaries, robberies, assaults, shootings, and they deal drugs, he said. Wray wants to form a new “Gang/Crime Prevention Unit.”

The unit would work closely with neighborhood officers, community policing teams, detectives and others by tapping the expertise of staffers who analyze crime data.

Wray said he’ll provide more details about his proposal after he talks with the mayor. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz was out of town on vacation.

Spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson said she believes the chief wants to reallocate existing officers for the unit.

Police have been focusing more on youth crime and have seen a sharp increase in gun offenses this year.

On June 9, a day after police held a news conference asking the public for help control gun incidents, 17-year-old Karamee Collins Jr. was shot and killed in the Meadowood neighborhood. Several other shootings and arrests have followed.

The upswing in violence echoes events of two years ago, when a series of homicides uncovered neighborhood frustration about offenses such as loitering and noise.

After a series of heated public meetings, the city added 30 positions to the police department.

Two weeks ago, Cieslewicz said another big surge in police numbers won’t solve today’s problems.

“You don’t solve the problem of crime by flooding the area with police, because you can’t do it forever, and it just pushes the people who are causing problems to other places in the city,” he said.

He said he wanted Wray to pull together area law enforcement and come up with solutions. Cieslewicz also floated the idea of police getting parental permission to search children’s rooms for weapons without court-issued search warrants.