The number of murders in East China's Jiangsu province has decreased by 10 percent over the past year, while 97 percent of the cases were resolved, a senior officer with the criminal investigation authority in the province said.

A total of 900 murder cases were cracked by Jiangsu police in 2010, Ge Xifang, deputy head of the criminal investigation bureau under the Jiangsu provincial public security department, told China Daily in an exclusive interview.

"Sixty percent of the murder cases were caused by civil disputes," he said.

According to Ge, criminal investigations are becoming more dependent on information collected online.

"More than 60 percent of the criminal cases were cracked by the help of online information," Ge said.

In addition, cutting-edge technologies have been widely used by police, and those technologies have significantly facilitated investigations, Ge said.

"Solving cases through the Internet can increase efficiency of the police and save personnel," said Dai Peng, dean of the investigation department of the Beijing-based Chinese People's Public Security University.

"However, with the increasing movement of the population and the rising complexity of criminal cases, the shortages in personnel of public security authorities and the lack of improved technologies are more and more noticeable," Dai added.

According to Ge, organized crime still haunts the province, and its structure tends to be more complex and underground.

"We should be good at analyzing, identifying and researching relevant cases to detect mafia-like gangs, and once nailing them we will eliminate these bad guys as early as possible," he said.

He also boasted about the absence of police officers and their relatives in running entertainment businesses, which have appeared in news reports for allegedly harboring indecent behaviors such as drug transactions and prostitution.

"We have done pretty well in this respect," he said, implying the lack of corruption of the local police.