ThxProtector, I’m having some trouble following your post, but I gathered the following:
There’s a crime that police aren’t able to solve. A civilian, who is unaffiliated with law enforcement, goes online and gets help from a group of people on the internet to solve a crime, and the police chief is grumpy because his pride is hurt.
First of all, if this is in England, as mentioned in your post, we know very little about law enforcement outside of the USA.
In America, police chiefs are generally an appointed position who works at the will of a mayor. It would be unusual for a chief to be allowed to be demoted because they are in an appointed position; they generally resign or are fired. It would likely not be a violation of policy to refuse outside help, so discipline is unlikely. However, if the mayor is annoyed by the situation, then they could replace the chief.
You said that the young woman was a civilian (not a police officer) and so the police department would have no authority to tell her not to talk with anybody. If the woman worked for the police department, then she would likely be violating policy if she released confidential information about a case to an outside source, and she could be fired.
