ohmidog!

About one of every four times that New York city police officers fire their weapons, they are taking aim at dogs, according to The New York Times.

And when shooting at dogs, lawmen more often find their mark than when shooting at people.

Officers shot 30 dogs last year and have shot 15 so far this year, the report said.

Of the 126 times that officers fired their guns in 2006, they shot at dogs 30 times, said Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who has analyzed the data in the department’s annual firearms discharge reports. A year earlier, he said, 32 of 123 shootings involved dogs, compared to 26 of 114 in 2004.

In those three years, Dunn said, the shots hit the dogs 55 percent of the time. When shooting at people, the shots hit their mark only 23.4 percent of the time.

On Wednesday night, police killed a pit bull in the hallway of a housing project on the Upper East Side. The dog, named Baby, charged at a group of officers who were responding to an assault call.

Police said Thursday that three officers fired a total of seven shots. Fragments from the richocheting bullets hit three officers and the dog’s owner, Milagros Martinez, who had let the dog out. Six people, including Martinez, 42, were arrested after the shooting.

They were charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance after officers found a pipe with crack cocaine residue inside the apartment, the police said.

The shooting will be investigated by a police internal review board. According to police guidelines on the use of deadly force, officers may not shoot at dogs “except to protect themselves or another person from physical injury and there is no other reasonable means to eliminate the threat.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the police had acted responsibly.